Dave Carver (Book 1): Thicker Than Blood (16 page)

“Good man.”

“Yeah, he is.”

“What about Krissy?”

“Not a scratch,” May told me. Her lips were pursed. “She’s with Rob at the hospital.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. “Good.”

“Guess so.” She shook her head. “I know you trust her, Dave, but I’m not so sure. For all we know, she may not have ever been enthralled—she could just be a well disguised groupie.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But I think there’s a better person to suspect: me.”

She glanced at me from the corner of her eye. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Is it?” I started counting off on my fingers. “I don’t remember everything that happened in Guyana. The vampires knew where the safe house was. They’ve claimed they wanted me alive several times now. Couldn’t I have been enthralled.”

May frowned, but she didn’t say anything. Suddenly tires squealed as she jerked the van over to the side of the road. Someone driving behind her honked his horn, but she didn’t seem to notice. She turned off the engine. I looked around nervously. I didn’t recognize the neighborhood, but it looked to be somewhere on the south side, near the FDR. It was late at night and dark, and the only other people in sight were a couple of gang-banger looking types.

“Get out,” May said, and she led by example.

The two guys looked up with interest at the pretty, athletically built redhead stood on the sidewalk. She gave them a look that would have blistered a hippo. When she drew her sword, they decided they had someplace better to be.

I got out of the van. “What are you doing, May?”

“Give me your hand.”

“Not till you tell me what you’re doing.”

“You’re scared you’ve been enthralled, right? So if you are, then the vamp’s still in there. And what’s the best way to determine if you’re under the influence of a supe force? A sword. So give me the damn hand.”

I did, my palm faced up.

May looked at me apologetically. “This’ll hurt.”

Then she drew the blade across the palm of my hand. I sucked in a breath as a wave of white-hot pain jolted across my hand. The skin screamed. Warm blood pooled on my hand...

And that was it.

I didn’t feel any different. There was no screaming voice in my head, no sudden release of hidden energy. If there was some supe hiding in my brain, the power of May’s sword would have ferreted him out into the open. I was clean.

I let out a breath that I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. I was okay! I wasn’t the traitor!

May gave me an impatient look with a quirk of her brow:
Satisfied
?

I was. I may not have known what the vamps were planning, but the fact that I wasn’t unwittingly a part of it was an enormous relief.

“Thanks, May,” I said. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“Can we get back in the car now?” she asked. “It’s cold out here, and we do still have this prisoner to deal with.”

Chapter 21

The office was a battlefield. Chairs lay on their sides with their legs snapped off in jagged stumps. Desks were overturned, some of them far from where I’d last seen them. One had a wet, reddish smear across one corner. There were dents and cracks and full-fledged holes in the walls, where furniture had smashed them. The floor was covered with half an inch of vampire blood, like a scene from a black and white version of
The Shining
.

Two dozen or more dead vampires lay tangled in the furniture or facedown in the cooling blood. Most were missing pieces, many of them heads. One had a wooden chair leg sticking from his back. All of the vampires were fairly far along in the decomposition process. Most were little more than skeletons. Made sense. An agent like Roberto wouldn’t entrust a mission like this to a bunch of newbies. These guys had been veterans.

I wish I could say that I paused a moment when I saw this much blood and destruction. It would mean that I wasn’t completely desensitized to violence and death and horror. I wish I could say that. But I can’t. If anything, I was excited. This many dead vampires, and not a single Table fatality? What had been intended to break our backs had turned into a big ol’ “W” for the home team. I was betting this was the most complete victory since the Battle of Guyana.

Closing the door behind me in case some neighbor decided to get nosy at the worst possible time, I waded through the blood in the bullpen. I scanned the vampire corpses for Roberto or Loretta, but I saw no sign of them or of their finely tailored clothes. I had to assumed they were still alive.

It was a good thing that Earl had told me how to get to the basement. If I hadn’t been looking for it, I wouldn’t have noticed the door along the back wall. It was painted the same drab gray as the rest of the wall and it blended in perfectly. My eyes passed by several times before they acknowledged that the door was there.

I grimaced as I walked through the office (I wondered if there was a cleaner somewhere in the city that knew how to get oil-like vampire blood out of carpet) and opened the door. There was no light above the stone stairs and no switch for one.

“
Of course
, it’s gonna be dark,” I muttered as I stepped gingerly onto the top step. “It’s always dark underground. Just once, couldn’t there be a nice sixty-watt? Would that be so damn hard?”

No light switch at the bottom of the stairs, either. Grumbling the whole time, I stepped away from the stairs and into the basement proper. Almost immediately something small, hard, and pointed smacked me in the forehead. I yelped and raised my hands to defend myself against...a string that hung from the ceiling. Cautiously, I gave it a pull, and on overhead lamp sprang to life.

For the most part, it looked like any basement, except for the stairs, which looked like they should have led to a medieval dungeon. The walls were unpainted and the floor was unadorned concrete. A huge metal filing cabinet stood in one corner and the back wall was occupied by an enormous work bench. Most of the floor was open and spacious, unused. But what attracted the eye the most was the section that was neither open nor spacious. One small corner, opposite the filing cabinet, was fenced off with floor-to-ceiling chain link fencing. A swinging gate stood open. Behind the fence there was a metal cot, made and unslept in. Upon closer inspection I realized there were strange symbols scratched into the metal, including the U-shaped piece that serve as the gate lock. Hieroglyphics, if I wasn’t mistaken.

I pulled the gate open and leaned in a little closer.

“”I wouldn’t do that.” May’s voice called from the stairs.

I froze in place and looked over my shoulder. She was gazing at the fence the way a bomb disposal expert might examine a particularly nasty piece of ordinance. Accountant-Vamp was in front of her, still zip-tied and looking like a dog unhappy to be on a leash.

I trusted May, and if she was looking at this fence that way, there was a reason. “What is it?”

“I think it’s a pyramid trap.”

“Ah,” I said, as if that explained everything.

She saw through me, snorted, rolled her eyes, and said, “See those little symbols? They’re Egyptian.”

“That much I put together, actually.”

“The pharaohs used to have mystics put symbols like these on their tombs. If anyone crossed that” —she pointed at a block of sandstone blended into the cement of the floor— “they wouldn’t come out again.”

I frowned. “What the hell is an ancient Egyptian anti-grave-robber spell doing in my basement?”

“I have no idea,” May said. “Pyramid traps went out of fashion with...well, with the pyramids. They were designed to hold a low-level god, but they’re really hard to build. There are easier ways to hold people.”

I shrugged. “Well I guess it’s good we’re not trying to hold a person.”

May brought the vampire the rest of the way down the stairs. His eyes were troubled, which wasn’t surprising. He’d just been dragged through the scene of a battle that had gone disastrously for his side. That would harsh anyone’s mellow.

While May wrestled with the vampire I examined the trap. It didn’t look like much, but I knew that meant nothing. With magic, appearances were nothing. The real question was, why had McCreary installed the thing without alerting the higher-ups in London? Something was happening here, and I didn’t know what it was.

May put the vampire at the mouth of the trap, placed her boot at the small of his back, and gave him a good kick. He tumbled, head over ass, into the tiny cell. As he passed over the sandstone, the earth beneath our feet shifted. A terrible sound thundered below, and I pictured some ancient subterranean beast rolling over in its sleep. The gate swung shut on its own accord and the U-bolt slammed closed.

Accountant-Vamp leapt to his feet and lunged at the gate. He hit it and flew backwards across the cell as if he’d been launched from a cannon. He fell to the floor and lay there in a ball.

Now that it was active, I got a sense of what May had been talking about. The pyramid trap was powerful, in a timeless sort of way. Like the Grand Canyon or one of the oceans. I damn well knew that this thing was beyond my comprehension.

The vampire apparently didn’t experience the same grandeur. He sprung to his feet with surprising agility and charged again. Once more he was thrown back. This time, he stayed on the floor and stared at the ceiling.

“How’d that feel?” I said.

“It hurt,” he replied. “Is that what you want to hear?”

“Well, I don’t
mind
hearing it.”

“That thing would hold an angry troll,” May said. “At least. So I’d stop with the charging rhino routine.”

He grunted.

“Come on, Dave,” May said. “Let’s let our guest get accustomed to his new home.”

Before I followed May upstairs I looked at the vampire. “Now you’ll get to see what it’s like to be held captive by the enemy. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.”

He stared in silence.

“Nothing to say? That’s alright. Get some sleep—tomorrow’s gonna be a big day for you.”

At a little after eight in the morning, May and I descended into the basement. We’d both changed clothes—me into a a clean black tee from my suitcase and she into a business casual blouse and slacks with a men’s suit vest. Across my waist, I wore my sword (which May had been holding onto while I was imprisoned by Roberto and Loretta) and my knife (which I’d found among the wreckage in the office—apparently some vampire had been using it during the battle—a skeletal hand still wrapped around the hilt). May wore a braided rope belt containing her own sword and her wand. I noticed that her hand seemed to hover more over the wand than it did the sword. In my left hand I held a big aluminum pipe that I’d also found the night before during the office-cleaning session. I slapped that metal against my right palm as we walked down the stairs.

Bill and Earl had loaded the bodies into the van and taken them to a guy that Rob knew out in Staten Island. (I didn’t want to know what the man planned to do with dozens of vampire corpses.) Meanwhile, May and I had scrubbed the floor, gotten as much blood out as possible, and changed the office from a battlefield into...well, into an office. I doubted the carpets would ever look or smell the same again, but it was a passable job. Now we had a more important task.

So there we were, heading into the normal-except-for-the-ancient-supernatural-prison basement to have a conversation with our prisoner.

He rose from his cot like Dracula from an old movie, looking warily at us. “What do you want?”

“Good, you’re up,” I said. “Listen, we need you to tell us what Roberto’s planning.”

“I will do no such thing.”

“Listen, you little—”

May put her hand on my shoulder, silencing my angry snarl.

“Good cop, remember,” she whispered into my ear, low enough the the vampire wouldn’t hear.

I scowled and did my best to turn it into a friendly smile.
Good cop. Right.
I pointed at May and looked at the vampire. “Do you know who this is?”

He stared for a moment and nodded.

“Good. Now, we want to know who you are,” I said. “What’s your name?”

He continued to stare at May for a moment before finally saying, “Craig.” He shrugged and looked sheepish, like he was embarrassed he didn’t have a sobriquet like Balthazar or Francisco or some other historical, vaguely exotic name like the ones his people tended to use.

“Okay,” I said. “Craig. How long have you been working for the elders?”

“I’m not,” he snapped, looking up. Then he hastened to add, “I’m a freelancer. Bobby recruited me.”

May very casually, very deliberately put her hand on her sword.

I looked at Craig. “Recruited you to do what?”

“He showed up at my apartment last year, told me who he was, asked if I...well, if I wanted to be part of his plan to, you know, overthrow you people.”

“Meaning the Round Table.”

“Yeah. Of course I said yes. You don’t turn down the elders.”

“What about the rest of the team?” I asked. “They’re recruits, too?”

“I don’t know,” Craig said. “I’d never met any of them before last night, except for Bobby and El. I’ve always kind of been a loner.”

“So you never spoke to an elder? Did you ever actually see Roberto talk to one?”

“No.”

I scratched my cheek. Interesting. I was starting to think this may have been an off the books operation. That, or Roberto didn’t trust Craig as much as I assumed he had. Time for a new tack.

“Who am I?”

“What are you talking about? You’re the new captain of the Round Table.”

“I know that,” I growled, “but what did Roberto want with me.”

“I don’t know—Bobby never said, and I never asked. I’m not sure what you’re thinking, but it’s not like me and Bobby were buddies.”

I stared at Craig for a long moment, but he had nothing more to offer. I nodded and jerked my head at May. “You know who she is, right?”

Craig narrowed his eyes and glared. “
La Bruja
.
”

“That’s right: The Witch. So you’ve heard a little bit about what she can do. You know what she’ll do if we find out you’re lying.” I leaned in so close that my nose almost touched the bars of the fence. “And I promise you, we will find out.”

May’s hand closed on the handle of her wand and her muscles twitched. The cot behind the fence burst into an eerie green fire. Craig yelped and threw himself as far from the flames as he could, but when he touched the metal of the pyramid trap, he was thrown back towards the fire. He screamed as he touched the inferno...and just as abruptly as it started, it was extinguished. There was no trace it had ever been on fire.

Craig looked at us. He swallowed nervously. “I get it.”

I threw my pipe at the gate. You know, for good measure. The aluminum rattled against the fence and made another unearthly noise. The fence rattled in its frame. I put my hand on the hilt of my sword. “Alright, Craig. I guess we’re done for now. You’re doing great. Keep it up and the Witch won’t have to turn your guts into snakes.”

Back upstairs, safely in the bullpen of the office, I asked May what she thought.

“Not sure,” she said. “It’s kind of hard to believe he doesn’t know more than he’d saying.”

“Sure is.”

It can be hard to judge whether a vampire is lying. They don’t have to worry about tells like sweaty palms or an increased heart rate (or any heart rate, for that matter). I’d long ago adopted a policy: If a vampire’s lips were moving, he was lying. Still, something was unsettling that surety. Which, I had to admit, could just mean that he was a good liar.

“Did you see his face?” I asked. “He was really afraid of you. Wouldn’t a loner freelancer roll over if he knew something, just to save his own ass?”

May was frowning, staring at the shattered window which separated the bullpen from the round table room.

“May?”

She jerked and looked at me, blinking rapidly. “Sorry, I was just thinking about something else. Yeah, you’re probably right. He was telling the truth.” She looked shaken.