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My vision readjusts slightly, now that I’m out in the open. I still feel the venom coursing through me, mellowing me when I should be sharp, but it’s getting better. I take a measured breath and nod deferentially. “I am, actually.”

He sniffs and shifts, throwing a side glance at the bodies. His voice lilts, like he can’t believe he’s even considering someone like me could kill his people. “You do that?”

“Yes.” Lying would be stupid. Their dead friends have bullet holes, and I have an empty gun. Even if their senses weren’t heightened enough to hear the fear in my voice, they’d still be able to put two and two together. “They interfered with my hunt. I assumed they didn’t get Loreley’s notice in time, but that’s not my fault.”

The head vampire flares his nose and balls his fists, staring at me like I just shat on his boot. A jerk of his chin sends one of his goon-twins scampering off. The sound of dead meat flapping around fills the nightly courtyard as he flips over the dead and looks through their pockets. “Shot,” he proclaims and moves on to the next body. The body parts of the vampire Cor ripped apart make him hesitate for a moment, and he pokes a disembodied arm with his steel-capped boot, but he keeps going through the rest of the corpses with no further comment.

And all through this, the dead-eyed leader never takes his eyes off me. And to top it off, I can feel the other three spearing me with their stares, silent and unmoving. Lurking. By the time the goon has finished his inspections, I’m positively squirming. And cold. And fucking tired of everything.

“Happy now? I’ve got places to be.”

The head vampire shakes his head minutely, then relaxes his jaw. A small scar appears in the corner of his mouth when his frown wrinkles even out. “Not yet. Why did you kill them?”

Why, indeed. ‘Because they tortured a vampire I’ve just met, and it didn’t sit right with me’ probably won’t fly. Telling them about the strange connection between Cor and me wouldn’t go over well either. And I will never, ever mention the thing with the venom where I almost humped a caveman vampire because he drooled on my neck. Nope.

I blink and give him my best Mona Lisa smile. “They were hunting a witness to a breach of Contract and I couldn’t let them kill him,” I say mildly, somehow managing to hide the shiver in my voice. Then I take a risk. “Maybe you know him. Big guy, although not as big as you, but still impressive. Fast. Wild. Didn’t seem to care he was dressed in nothing but rotting tatters. Ripped that one apart before the others got him down.” I nod towards the chunks of flesh as if to make sure they know I mean the massacred corpse. “Ran off as soon as I cleared a path for him, unfortunately.” I pause and watch the twitches on my opponent’s face. “You know where I can find him?”

The leader knows exactly who I’m talking about, and he doesn’t like what he’s hearing. It’s not that he shows much of anything—he is way too controlled for that—but rather what he doesn’t show. He freezes, ceases to move, and if he wasn’t breathing and blinking every so often, I would think time has stopped. His eyes sit like sharpened coals in his rugged face, a hatred too intense for words boiling through those dark orbs. This isn’t anything I did, although it still makes me shiver involuntarily. Whatever caused him feel that much rage has been brewing for a long time. And maybe, just maybe, I shouldn’t poke at it again.

Then he seems to remember who I am and why I’m here. He comes back to life a different person, licks his lower lip, and readjusts his stance. I wouldn’t call it squirming; he’s too bulky for that, but it’s a good attempt at it. And the rage is gone, leaving the stage for something that looks entirely too much like worry. Not that it makes much of a difference. He ignores my question and snaps his fingers over his shoulder, as if giving an unspoken order, then crosses his arms. “Where did you meet him?” he asks, his accent making a growl of his voice. “Maybe we can help each other out.”

The corpse flipper grunts at the snap and takes off toward the building I came out of. Another goon says something in a language I can’t place, turns and walks off in a quick trot, trailing the path I took to get here like a fucking blood hound. I turn my head and watch him as he examines the wall I climbed, then look back to the more imminent threat.

I allow myself a moment to ponder his question. I have entirely too little information to make any sort of guess how the pus-vampire could be connected to Cor or these guys, but I’m sure that Cor won’t go back to the hospital. Which means I can tell them about what happened there. They could probably even give me what I want most: more information about Cor and how he ended up where I found him. I could simply ask them. If I weren’t so sure they put him into that silver coffin, I wouldn’t be able to resist. With things being as they are, though…

“There’s an old hospital about five blocks south from here. Big metal fence, loads of overgrowth; it’s almost hidden from view. My partner and I got a tip that a supe killing off theology students might hide out there, so we checked it out. Turns out the tip was spot on, although I’m not sure those beasts really were vampires.”

The goon cocks his head. “Oh?”

The shudders come unbidden. It’s a single sound, but he still makes it into a demand, a curse, a question, and a threat all in one. His face doesn’t move, remains unchanged, but I still tense at the unspoken, cold warning in his voice.

I hesitate and chew my lip. “There were two of them, a man and a woman. The man was fast. Very fast. There in a blink, gone in the next. But he looked… sickly, and she looked even worse. I don’t know how else to put it. Broils and pus everywhere, almost frail, pale, inhuman. I’ve never seen a vampire look like that.” Not that I’ve seen any vampires outside of photographs and home movies, but I’m reasonably sure. “If I didn’t know it’s impossible I’d say she looked like she had the plague, or leprosy. Like she was rotting right in front of my eyes. The man wasn’t as bad, but he looked like he was on his way down the same path.”

One of the last two remaining goons hisses through clenched teeth, his face paling. “Might have been Isolde,” he says.

The leader turns and punches him without so much as a blink, and the goon goes down with a sickening crackle of broken bones. He back to me as if nothing happened and snarls an angry, “Continue.” An order, not a request.

Okay then. I store that name away for now and stutter through the next few words. “As I said, we found them, and they were dead set on making it as hard as possible for us to kill them. There were a bunch of thralls involved, and the male simpered off to leave us to his lady friend, but to make long things short, it was a mess. I had to take cover in a room with a coffin. A silver one. And when the lady vampire tried to break in, the coffin lid snapped open.”

The leader bites out a curse before I can continue my tale of half-truth, turning away and letting off a staccato of unpleasantness that I luckily don’t understand. It sounds like Swedish or Icelandic, and now I’m having a hard time not picturing the goons as vikings. One of the dead falls victim to the burst of anger, getting both stomped on and kicked at until one arm detaches and sails off into the darkness. More blood seeps out of the gaping stump, thick as molasses. The raw meat where the arm tore off glistens in the moonlight.

Yep. No poking the angry viking. And no hurling until they leave. I swallow convulsively to keep the sick down and close my eyes as I take slow, shallow breaths. When I open them again, the vampires are gone.

CHAPTER SIX

THIS HAS GOT to be the longest night ever. I wish I’d never come into this godforsaken city.

I have been walking for close to two hours. For some parts of that march I have been full-out sprinting in soaked boots, which explains why I lost most of the feeling in my feet. At least I’m still alive.

The rain still patters away, big, fat drops that steadily lose strength as the clouds empty their bellies onto the city for the second time tonight. The flickering motel sign appears in the distance, illuminating the soaked street like a Fata Morgana, beckoning me closer. Yellow and green neon light bounces off the two cars parked in front of it, vying with the three streetlights surrounding the parking lot. The utter brightness is such a startling sight that I almost don’t know how to deal with it. If I weren’t so exhausted, so shook up, I would call it pretty. But nothing in this godforsaken place will ever be pretty.

I hadn’t realized why people call this district ‘Dark City’ instead of just ‘the southern ghetto’ until tonight. I mean, yes, I already heard about the lack of electricity in this area before I came to Babylon City. About the gang wars and mafia killings that led to the city officials trying to smoke them out by turning off all utilities to this part of the ghetto. I always thought the city was overreacting, using the most stupid way possible to deal with a problem that should have been left to the police force, or maybe the military. It didn’t even work, except scaring away the cops for good. The gangs are still going strong. The Mafia is still here. But there are more consequences to the city’s idiocy than anyone could have foreseen. Broken streetlights never sounded that awful. It’s just dark, right? Electricity issues can’t get that bad when you’re not in a Third World country. Tonight has taught me differently.

The dark makes people vicious. The dark creates demons.

I saw a man get stabbed for his social security card. I saw a group of at least ten men go at each other with knives and baseball bats over a car parked in the wrong spot. Someone shoved a whore out of a second-story window across the street. Her scream echoed down the street until it cut off, followed by a silence that still makes my skin crawl. I tried to help, I did, but three men with fucking machine guns were suddenly there and the ensuing firefight sent me sprinting off as fast as my clammy feet would carry me. This entire district is a war zone, worse than any veil could ever be. Humans are vile.

The hotel sign above me hums softly as I walk past the front desk door. I feel like a ghost as I shuffle along empty guest rooms with drawn curtains and dirty windows, my soaked hair still dripping water. I’m so cold, I can’t remember what being warm feels like, but I’m about to find out. Two more turns to the back of the motel, and I’ll be home. Asha’s voice drifts around the building already, and I speed up, wanting nothing more than to be safe.