Chapter Twenty-three
Ethan
He left the Three Sisters Magic Shoppe some time later, his head even more dazed than when he’d gone inside, though some of the churning in his stomach had settled now that he had somewhere else to focus his energy. He left feeling confused about the reading and the direction that Edie had pointed him. She’d reminded him of his promise to Adam the day before, and he knew better than to distrust her advice.
It made sense, Ethan supposed, fix the easier ghost problem before tackling the personal one.
At least, that’s what he repeated to himself as he stumbled down the street. It was several blocks before he remembered that he hadn’t driven himself; he’d used Patrick’s phone and called an Uber in one of only two smart decisions he’d made in the last twenty-four hours. But now he stood on the sidewalk, freezing without a jacket and stranded because he had left his partner’s cellphone on the hall table.
“Didn’t think this through very well, did you?” Ali asked, walking past him in her shorts and tank top, hands hooked in the back pockets. She shot him a sloe-eyed look over her shoulder as she slipped between a cluster of people huddled on the sidewalk sipping from bright red cardboard cups.
Ethan glared after her, until one of the living people noticed and frowned, mistaking his dour look as being directed at them. He fished around in his pocket, but he didn’t even have the change for a bus, assuming he could find one going in the right direction.
He still had yet to see a glimpse of Adam all morning, and it wasn’t clear to Ethan whether that was because the ghost had decided not to follow him or because something was keeping him just out of visual range. Besides that, he’d left all of the dead man’s research back at the house, which meant he either needed to consult Adam about where to go looking next or return home, a prospect that filled Ethan with dread. With no better option, he shoved his hands into his pockets, hunched his shoulders against the wind spitting droplets of stray rain into his face, and began walking.
As he went, Ethan caught flashes of blonde hair ahead that made his guts twist. He wondered what Ali’s ghost thought she was doing, if she intended to lead him away from where he needed to be going or—
His body steaming from sweat, Ethan finally stopped and sat down at a rusting bistro table set outside of a little cafe. He just needed to catch his breath and think. Across the street, he caught a glimpse of a blonde woman staring at him. In the seat across the table, Adam appeared suddenly frowning at Ethan, his eyes dark with disapproval that the mage felt akin to a physical blow.
“Where have you been?” he demanded in a shaky voice.
Adam’s mouth twisted. “You didn’t expect me to stick around for that performance, did you?”
Ethan looked away, met a familiar pair of eyes—fuck, why had it taken himself so long to recognize them as a match for his own?—and shuddered.
“I thought you were a piece of work, but that was fucked up,” the ghost continued.
“I know,” Ethan said, his voice cracked. He buried his face in his hands, unable to bear looking at either of apparition.
“You’re the first person he’s ever—”
“I know!” Ethan snapped, guilt and anger warring strongly enough to give him back his voice just as the door to the cafe swung open, expelling a couple carrying paper bags whose expressions dimmed and skittered away from him. That’s right, better not look too long or too hard at the crazy person or he might try to talk to you next, Ethan thought sourly.
“I don’t want to talk about that,” he hissed at Adam. “We’re supposed to be helping you pass on or whatever. So, let’s just get that done. Then you can fuck off and you won’t have to see anything else I…”
“Yeah, let’s do that,” Adam said grimly. “Like I tried to tell you last night, I didn’t recognize that club.”
“But my guess was right, there were vampires there.”
“Nothing to say that’s the only place in the city they could be.”
“Vampires in clubs, vampires killing cops, vampires feeding on college girls. If it’s not the same coven, then that’s an awful lot of bloodsuckers for one town that supposedly boasts the lowest population of them in North America.”
Adam frowned, drawing into himself while Ethan sat there, trying not to lose all feeling in his extremities. There wouldn’t be a white Christmas, there never was in this city, but it felt as though Seattle might be trying for one all the same. The pervasive damp that came with intermittent showers only helped him feel uncomfortable as well as cold.
“I guess it would be strange to have more than one coven here,” Adam said.
Ethan nodded stiffly. “They’re more territorial than wolves, and we both know how bad wolves can be. But all of that is just conjecture. I have to start with something I know, and I know that there are vampires at Le Sang. It’s some sort of hunting ground.”
As he spoke, the ghost nodded agreement, staring up into the sky with a curious expression. He asked, “Is it really the full moon?”
“I don’t know,” Ethan said, following his gaze, blinking into the soupy grey cloud cover.
“So, how are we going to get back to Le Sang?”
“If we’re lucky,” he said, standing to peer through the front window of the cafe which turned out to be less of a cafe and more a hole-in-the-wall coffee shop, “this place will be stuck in the early aughts.” He slipped inside, eyes skimming over the bar, the patrons—who appeared to be an eclectic mix of young and middle-aged hipsters wearing earth-toned layers and at least three heads sporting dreads—before he landed on an antiquated white and blue Mac computer set up on a little table for patrons. He ordered an Americano from the barista and asked about the computer.
“It’s free for customer use. Limit’s an hour and don’t try to surf any porn.”
“Right. Thanks.” He picked up his coffee and commandeered the Mac to order a taxi to come pick him up in twenty minutes.
“Clever,” Adam said, breathing cool air over the back of Ethan’s neck. He twitched and flicked a finger at the ghost.
They left the coffee shop and rode in silence back to the club district from the night before. Ethan kept a tight rein on his nerves and ignored it when Ali slipped into taxi’s front passenger seat.
“You’re one tense mother-fucker,” Adam hissed, making Ethan flinch.
The driver pulled up outside the address Ethan had given him and told him the price.
“Would you mind waiting here? I shouldn’t be more than ten minutes.”
The gave him a look. “If you’re willing to pay for it.”
“Yeah, it’s fine.”
“I still need you to pay for—”
“Sorry, right.” Ethan pulled out his wallet and frowned when he realized that he’d grabbed Patrick’s on the way out of the house. Luckily the wolf had a couple of credit cards with his signature tucked in the front flap.
“Ten minutes, Mr Clanahan?”
“Maybe fifteen.”
“All right.” The driver ran the card, had Ethan sign for it, and handed it back.
Ethan took a deep breath of cool air and jogged up to the front door of the club, unsurprised to find it locked. Knocking produced no response. He checked to make sure the taxi driver was still there before he slipped around the back of the building. The employee entrance was also locked, but it didn’t take more than a thought to slip the lock. He pressed one palm over the silent alarm box and shivered as a lick of electricity whispered through him, frying the circuitry.
“So, what are we looking for?” Adam whispered.
“Someone in charge I guess. We need to know who these vampires are and how long they’ve been operating in the city,” Ethan said, navigating the cramped back corridor. A bare bulb turned on when he flicked the wall switch and illuminated a mop sink, stepladders, a water heater, and another door. He went through the door and reached for another light switch; this time the overheads illuminated what appeared to be a staff room, complete with a couple of large round tables, cheap plastic chairs, and a bank of lockers against one wall. Ethan drifted over to a bulletin board on the opposite wall, scanning for anything interesting, but it was too much to hope that there’d be a “So, you’re a vampire?” poster out in the open.
“Do you ever come up with a plan or do you just blunder through life like this?” Ali asked, appearing at his side.
Ethan forced himself not to look at her.
“I thought maybe it was just my bad luck, the way you came after me without a fucking clue what was going on, what I was planning to do.”
“I knew enough,” he muttered.
“What?” Adam asked from the other side of the room.
Ethan ignored him. Tried to ignore them both but it was hard when Ali didn’t obligingly disappear back into the ether. She seemed determined to get all of this out.
“Did you mean to kill me?”
“Of course not.”
“I don’t mean in the moment, I mean, when you got on that boat to come after me—did you have a vision in your head of my death?”
He shot her an incredulous look.
“Oh, don’t look at me like that. It’s not like you had to be pushed all that hard to push back. You don’t really expect me to buy this bullshit display do you? This wallowing you’ve done, drowning in your own self-disgust as though my death didn’t free you.”
“It’s not—”
“It was convenient.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Tied up all the loose ends, some of them you didn’t even know about, did you? All those people I drained dry with the bloodstone. All those years of work. Preparation. And then tracking you down. Not that that proved too difficult. And getting into your blind spot, shit, that was even easier. Killing me silenced me. No way that’s not convenient.”
“It’s not,” he said in a hoarse voice, turning to stare at her, sick with the sense that she wasn’t wrong.
Ali smirked.
“Dude, who are you talking to?” Adam’s voice snapped his attention back to the moment.
Ethan scrubbed at the bristling ends of his hair and said, “My other apparition, obviously,” gesturing at where she’d been standing. Adam walked around to face him, head swiveling around as he made a show of looking where Ethan pointed.
“Dude.”
“Don’t—” Ethan shook his head, giving up.
“Seriously,” Adam said, reaching for him before he remembered that he couldn’t touch. “There’s no one there.”
“She comes and goes like you do.”
“No, I mean, there was no one there when you were talking to yourself.”
“No, I was talking to—Ali,” he said, choking on the name but determined to get it out. Ethan didn’t like the uncertain look on the other ghost’s face. “The other ghost.”
Adam shook his head.
“Oh, come on, she’s been with us all afternoon. And at the house. The other ghost,” he repeated, as though that would somehow make it clearer, but all it did was make the frown deepen on Adam’s already translucent brow.
The ghost seemed to shimmer around the edges, as though he might vanish at any moment and suddenly Ethan was gripped by a cold sweat at the thought of the ghost leaving him here with this confusion prepped to bubble over. He needed to make Adam understand who he meant, to wipe the look off his face that warped and shifted as the ghost took a step back.
“The blonde woman whose been following me around. The snide one. The other ghost.”
“Yeah, I heard you the first time, that doesn’t make what you’re saying make any more sense.”
As Ethan groped for a response, the second door leading into the break room swung open, admitting a pale young man who froze at the sight of, well, Ethan unless he was unfortunately cursed with the ability to see ghosts as well. He met Ethan’s eyes with a mixture of shock and confusion before anger took over.
“What are you doing in here? No one’s allowed—the bar is closed!”
“You work here?”
“Who are you?”
Ethan’s eyes slid down and snagged on the man’s pale wrist, exposed where he was holding onto the door. Hard to pass off those symmetrical marks as anything other than vampire bites. The stranger caught him looking and dropped his sleeve, eyes wide and scoping out the room. Ethan moved before he tried to run away, grabbing him by the shoulder with his right hand as he called up his magic in his left.
“Don’t,” he snapped. “I need you to answer a couple of questions for me.”
The young man struggled against him, but Ethan grabbed his bitten wrist with his left hand, twisting the arm back and turning them in a tight circle as the thrall tried to wiggle away from him.
“Stop,” he commanded in a low growl.
“Fuck off!”
Ethan let magic zing through his skin, making the young man jump and sag against him as Ethan pressed him face first into the door, shoving it closed under their combined weight.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he grumbled, even though he could feel where the skin had warmed under his touch.
“Who the fuck are you?”
“Doesn’t matter. You’re a thrall. Are there any others?”
Irritated silence greeted him.
Ethan squeezed on the thrall’s wrist, thinking hard about how he wanted nothing but the truth until the thrall nodded his head.
“Where’s the coven?”
He could practically hear the young man’s teeth grinding as he tried to resist the urge to answer Ethan’s questions, so he pressed harder, digging one of his knees into the back of the kid’s thigh while he did his best impression of Obi-Wan Kenobi and thought, Tell me loud and implacably with his magic buzzing along his nerves.
“Sleeping!” the thrall gasped, whole body jerking under Ethan’s grip. “It’s the full moon.”
It was a slim chance, but he asked, “Have you ever heard the name Adam Sloan?”
“What? Who’s that?”
“He’s a cop. Vampires killed him.”
“And what, you think you’re Frank Castle?”
Ethan frowned. “What?”
“We don’t kill people,” the thrall whined, flexing his hand in Ethan’s grip.
“Someone did, and you’re the only vampires I’ve found in this city so far.”
A snort greeted this statement, and Ethan manhandled the thrall around so that he could peer into his face, easier to read what he was thinking if he could see his eyes.
“If that’s what you think, then you’re not looking hard enough.”
“Enlighten me.”
“Fuck. Off.”
“You expect me to believe there’s another vampire coven here in secret?” Ethan pressed one hand against the thrall’s sternum. He was thin, collarbones standing out in sharp relief against thin skin, pale enough to show the veins, and it didn’t take much effort for Ethan’s fingers to span the width of his throat in a silent threat he didn’t have any intention of carrying out—but this kid didn’t know that.
The thrall swallowed under his fingers, staring at him with big, bloodshot eyes.
“What does a wizard care about what happened to some cop?”
“Professional curiosity. Stop prevaricating.”
“I swear, none of them, the ones I serve—they don’t feed on unwilling humans. They don’t kill people. The other coven’s trying to frame us.”
“Other coven?” he asked, threading his voice with disbelief.
“We didn’t know they were here when we arrived last December. Ash thought Seattle would be easy pickings. No coven, no competition. Thought we could stay a couple years, have a little fun, use the club to draw in the younger crowd. The sorts of humans who think it’s a thrill to be fed from just once or twice. Not potential thralls, just—just—groupies! But after we got here…” A shadow filled the kid’s eyes.
Ethan narrowed his own and turned up the edge on his will, thinking again The truth, into the space between them until the thrall’s body went tight.
“They’re trying to frame us.”
“Who are they?”
The thrall’s head jerked violently as he pressed his lips closed tight, body spasming as Ethan repeated the question, and then his eyes rolled up in the back of his head and he collapsed, pale as a fucking sheet.
Ethan made an irritable noise and helped the unconscious young man slide to the ground, leaving him propped up against the door jam.
“Damn it.”
“Well that was freaky,” Adam said. “What did you do to him?”
“And old Jedi mind trick. He must be under a compulsion not to talk about this other coven.”
“So that’s enough confirmation for you?”
“Not really. We’ve got a bunch of upstart invaders sleeping…somewhere around here, and another group that’s been in Seattle for an indeterminate length of ‘longer.’”
“Last December means these guys probably aren’t the same ones who killed me.”
Ethan sighed and led them back outside. He breathed a sigh of relief when he saw the taxi still idling at the curb.
“What now?” Adam asked. “And don’t think I’ve forgotten what we were talking about before that guy interrupted us.”
“Yeah, yeah. I want to know why you had Lachlan Graham’s personnel file in with the rest of that shit. Maybe he worked for this other coven.” Ethan patted his pocket, reminded all over again that he didn’t have his own cellphone anymore. “Let’s just hope he’s listed in the yellow pages.”
Patrick
Though the days had begun to grow longer, they were still close enough to the winter solstice for twilight to slink in on silent paws well before dinner was even on the table. The pack would eat and then go about the business of driving everyone out to their running grounds at Myrtle Beach.
Pat felt uneasy leaving Ethan alone all day without a word, but he still didn’t have a number for the mage, nor his own phone, which he’d discovered missing along with his wallet just before they sat down to eat. It was a testament to how distracted he’d been that morning that he’d managed to drive over without causing an accident, resigning himself to pack’s full moon plans. He would put off apologizing to Ethan until the next day and try not to let his unhappy mood spoil everyone else’s holiday.
He moved food around his plate, seated at his mother’s right hand, and listened to the rise and fall of cheerful voices around him. He forced himself to eat more out of habit and because he didn’t want to draw attention to himself than out of any real hunger, even though his father had done a tremendous job with the spread. Vector had been seated several seats down from him, preventing any work discussion, and across from him, Grace sat shoulder to shoulder with Mallory—not that Pat wasn’t happy for them, but he’d been surprised to see her there. Pat watched the way they sat close together, never out of contact, heads bent together as they whispered a private conversation, and felt that green-eyed monster slithering through him again.
Pat stuffed turkey into his mouth without tasting it.
When everyone had eaten their full, the pack worked to clear the table and put everything away. Vector approached him in the garage while he had his hands full of leftovers; his cousin had his own stack of repackaged sides to add to what Pat was trying to fit into limited fridge space
“Moon, not more,” Pat muttered, divesting Vector of his burden. The other wolf gave him a lopsided smile.
“I’m supposed to bring in the pie.”
Pat nodded, shifting things around so he could load Vector up with the dessert dishes.
“Do you mind if I grab a ride with you over to the run?” Vector asked after a beat, sounding hesitant.
“Sure,” Pat said.
“Thank you.”
“Thought you had your license now?”
“Yes, well. Doesn’t mean I like driving even if I do it a little more often these days. I didn’t want to leave Lachlan without a car if there’s an emergency and he can’t get a hold of me.”
Pat nodded. He grabbed a half dozen whip cream cannisters out of the fridge and kicked the door shut, nodding for Vector to lead the way. “Fair enough.”
“How are things at home?” Vector asked. He used his knee to knock the garage door open. He glanced back at Pat’s face and shook his head. “Forget I asked.”
Pat grimaced. “Ask me tomorrow. I can’t—”
“Sorry.”
The pack fell upon the pies with relish, and then it was madness while parents tried to corral the younger wolves into transportation assignments. The handful of human pack members—three adults including Mallory and an adopted teenager—had volunteered to stay behind with the children too young for a wolf run.
Vector rode in the Camero’s passenger seat in companionable silence, a solid presence who might not have known all of Pat’s secrets, but enough of them that his willingness to set aside work and personal problems was a balm against Pat’s roughed up soul. They parked between two sedans and climbed out into the crisp winter air, breath misting even in the dark.
Pat had stripped off his shoes and socks and was working on his belt when two adolescent wolves, already full shifted, came flying through the parking lot. Before he could move out of the way, one of the wolves collided with his legs, sending them both tumbling into a pool of stagnant water. It soaked through his shirt and jeans, covering him in mud that smelled strongly of oil and gasoline from the parking lot runoff. Pat snarled, grabbing the young wolf by the scruff of her neck as he struggled to get to his feet. Vector rounded the car, already naked and face twisted up as he tried to stifle his amusement. He helped the wolf disentangle herself from Pat and then offered him a hand to his feet.
“Ah, hell,” he muttered.
“At least it’ll be dry by tomorrow.”
In reply, Pat ripped off his ruined clothes, throwing them in the trunk of the car, and slid seamlessly into his wolf-skin. He looked around, but the two younger wolves had been smart and taken off when his back was turned. He yipped at Vector who leapt into his own wolf-skin, trotted over to lick at his muzzle in obeisance, and then the two of them loped off to join the rest of the pack.
Above their heads, the moon rose full and fat, a burnished gold that seemed to blot out the whole sky.