They marched me across the overgrown and desolate field. I could make out the old shop buildings on my right. I knew Old Sacramento was behind me. I felt that familiar buzz and wondered what else might be out here in the rail yard. Maybe it was the accumulation of many dead bodies, their spirits possibly hovering nearby. I’d never had that happen before, but there’s a first time for everything, isn’t there?
Of course, it didn’t look as though I was going to be having too many more first times. I tried to look for someplace I could run to hide or something I could use as a weapon, but there was nothing.
We walked out into the unmown grass. It was already up to my waist. By midsummer, it would turn brown and die and be a fire hazard. Now it was green and fresh and still growing.
Baldy shoved me forward. I tripped and landed on my knees. “Any last words, Ms. Markowitz?” he asked.
I heard him click the safety off the gun. He was breathing faster now. Was he frightened? Or did the idea of putting a bullet in the back of my skull excite him?
Kneeling on the ground, the hum of the presence of something supernatural got stronger. It was probably something in the ground.
He inhaled deeply. This was going to be it. He was steadying himself, making sure his kill shot was sure and smooth. He’d let his breath out and before he inhaled again, he’d pull the trigger. I bowed my head and tried not to be afraid, but it was impossible. This was it.
Something huge and hairy came streaking at us from the right. Baldy pulled back as it hit him from the side, taking him down in one powerful lunge. The monster stood over him and snarled. A werewolf. The buzz I’d been getting hadn’t been from dead bodies or old deities. It had been from an approaching werewolf. I really needed a better system, like when you get a certain ringtone on your cell phone when a particular person calls.
Baldy pumped three shots into the werewolf’s chest. The werewolf recoiled, pushed back by the percussion of the bullets, and Baldy started to scramble away. Within seconds, however, the werewolf was back over him snarling. Unless the bullets were silver, they were only going to make him madder. He turned his face toward me and growled. Baldy might be down and no longer able to put a bullet in the back of my skull, but I was still kneeling here on the ground almost eye to eye with an angry werewolf.
I dropped my own gaze to the ground and tried to still the frantic beating of my heart. My fear would only drive him further into his bloodlust.
The other three men turned and ran.
Another streak came from the right. This one was shaped like a man. It took Jimmy down and pinned him within seconds. The other two kept running.
Vampire. Nothing else could move that fast. I heard Jimmy scream as the vampire started to feed. I couldn’t bear to look. Next to me, the werewolf lifted Baldy and shook him, the way a dog might shake a squirrel or a rabbit. I heard Baldy’s neck snap, and the werewolf dropped him to the ground.
The vampire was still feeding on Jimmy. He was going to drain him. That much was clear to me. Was I going to be next? And for which one? Would I be Purina Werewolf Chow? Or Vampire V-8? Or some very unpleasant buffet for the two of them?
I could feel the werewolf’s hot breath on my neck. He was right behind me. He began to circle me, coming around to face me. Then he licked my face. I lifted my face and looked right into his eyes. “Paul?”
He licked me again. I should have known.
“Jesus, you guys are fast.” Ted came trotting up wearing a backpack. “I can do a six-minute mile and I didn’t have a prayer of keeping up.”
He shouldered Paul out of the way and sank down in front of me. “You’re alive.” He pulled me to his chest and held me against him. It would have been nice if the rocks hadn’t been digging into my knees and I wasn’t still getting over being scared out of my ever-loving mind.
Alex came up wiping his face with a handkerchief. “Ready to hunt, Fido?”
Paul growled and snapped at him.
“Temper, temper,” Alex snarled back, his fangs showing now. He turned to Ted and me and said, “We’ll be back. Wait here.”
They were gone in a flash of fur and flesh.
“What the hell were you thinking?” Ted’s hands worked at the knots around my wrists. The ropes chafed, but I didn’t make a sound. I was as steamed as he was. Where did he get off with all that righteous indignation?
“I was thinking that I would take care of this myself and no one else would get hurt.” My hands came free. I swung them in front of me and hugged myself.
“Except you, of course.” He came back in front of me. Swearing under his breath, he started to rub the blood flow back into my hands. He sat back on his heels and glared at me. “You were going to get yourself killed.”
“I assure you, that was not my original intention.” I winced as the pins-and-needles sensation flooded my wrists and hands.
He rolled his eyes. “Gee, that’s a relief. So it wasn’t a suicide mission. You’ve gladdened my heart.”
“Speaking of suicide missions, do you have any idea of what you’ve gotten yourself into? Any idea at all?” I knew what he’d gotten himself into. He was a human—a ’Dane—showing up to rescue a Messenger in the company of a couple of ’Canes, neither of whom were supposed to be on rescue missions themselves.
He rubbed his hand across the back of his neck. “I doubt it. I’m still not sure I shouldn’t drive to the closest mental hospital and ask for their first vacant padded room. It’s hard to deny what I’m seeing with my own eyes, but given my family history, it wouldn’t be too far of a shot to figure I’d gone bat-shit crazy. Is this real, by the way?”
I slugged him in the shoulder. Not as hard as I could, but I didn’t totally pull it either.
“Ow!” He jumped up and away from me.
“You feel that?” I smiled up at him with absolutely no sincerity whatsoever.
“Yeah.”
“Then it’s real.” I reached up my hand, and true to form, he took it and helped me to my feet even though I’d just bruised his bicep in a big way. I know how to throw a punch.
Paul sauntered out of the darkness, back in human form and naked as the day he was born. There were three spots of blood marking where he’d been shot, but they were already healing. “Are you two done with the foreplay now? I’d like to get out of here.” He held out his hand, and Ted handed him the backpack he’d been carrying. Paul rummaged through it and pulled out a pair of jeans.
Ted politely averted his eyes, but I glared at Paul. I got a snort in response. “I never figured you for a girl who liked it rough, Melina, but I swear I learn something new every day.” He smiled, still looking a little too wolfish for me to be completely comfortable. I dropped my eyes.
“Who likes it rough?” Alex asked, walking up behind Paul, smoothing his hair back. Paul bristled but didn’t growl. Crazy. I knew the smell of a vampire would be anathema to him, yet here the two of them were. It looked as though we were witnessing the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
“Melina. She and Boy Wonder here were slugging it out a second ago.” Paul finished buttoning up his jeans and yanked on a T-shirt he’d taken from the backpack.
Alex smiled. His fangs were receding, but they were still there. “Really? How interesting. Actually, I could buy the rough stuff from Melina. Him? Not so much. Does he smell like food to you? He smells like food to me.”
“Everybody smells like food to you.” Paul did growl now.
Alex smiled, only a little bit of fang still visible in the moonlight. “True enough.” Then the two of them bumped fists.
I’d had enough of the boy bonding. “Did you get them all? Are they all . . . gone?”
“One got away.” Alex rolled the sleeves of his dress shirt back down.
Fabulous. I still had people trying to kill me on the loose. “Damn.”
“It was on purpose,” Paul told me. “We wanted one of them to get away to get the message back to his masters.”
“Do you think that’s going to be enough to get them to go away?” I brushed the dirt and gravel off my knees.
Paul and Alex exchanged glances. “I doubt it,” Alex finally said.
“These guys are tough. But it will make them think twice about going after you or your family. They don’t know we’re working on our own. My guess is, they didn’t know we really existed until a few minutes ago.” He shook his head. “You’d think they’d be able to extrapolate that if Chinese vampires really exist, then Western ones do, too.”
Paul shrugged. “People simply aren’t logical.”
A wave of fatigue washed over me. The earth shifted beneath my feet. Ted slid an arm around my waist, his body warm and solid next to mine. “Let’s get Melina home. We can talk strategy once we get her some food and make sure she’s okay.”
23
“YOU GOT HER!” NORAH LAUNCHED HERSELF AT ME FROM THE doorway. She threw her arms around me and held on as though she might drown if she let go. “Don’t ever do that again. We were so scared.”
Sophie and Ben crowded the doorway behind her. “Is she okay?” Sophie asked.
“She’s fine, but she needs to get inside and sit down. She’s exhausted, and I can hear her stomach growling from over here.” Ted gently detached Norah from me and shifted Sophie and Ben so we could get through.
I glanced toward my bedroom. I supposed my chances of going straight to bed were somewhere between slim and none. I sat down on the love seat in the living room, strangely content to have Ted fill up the other three-quarters of it. Alex headed directly into the kitchen. I smelled butter melting in the pan about twenty seconds later.
“Where did you go?” Norah sat down on the coffee table in front of me.
“I went to kill Henry Zhang.” It had been my plan in a nutshell. I didn’t feel like elaborating at the moment.
“By yourself?”
“How?”
“Where is he?”
“Why?”
Everyone was talking at once. I tucked my head into Ted’s shoulder and waited for the noise to die down. All the fight had gone out of me. My big plan had failed. I had failed. I didn’t have the nerve to do what needed to be done. I’d failed Mae again. Maybe I’d forget how to do a roundhouse kick next.
Alex set the grilled cheese sandwich cut in half diagonally in front of me next to a bowl of tomato soup. “Unless you go shopping, I’m not going to be able to make anything else in that piss-poor excuse of a kitchen in there. What’s with all the tofu anyway?”
Norah narrowed her eyes at him, but he just smiled back. She turned back to me. “Explain why you went there alone, Melina.”
“I’d endangered everyone around me enough. I thought if I took out Zhang, I’d be protecting all of you. I figured it was my problem, so I went to solve it.” I took a big bite of grilled cheese. No one could expect me to say anything else while I was chewing.
Norah got up from the coffee table and flung herself in the papasan chair. “She’s an idiot, isn’t she?”
“But kind of a sweet one,” Paul said.
I chewed.
“You know we were all frantic, don’t you?” Norah asked. She pointed at Ted. “I thought that one was going to pop a blood vessel. The other two weren’t much better.” Then she looked at Alex. “Do you have blood vessels to pop?”
I stopped before I took another bite. “How did you find me anyway?”
“You’re not as clever as you think. And no, I can’t pop a blood vessel.” Alex examined his fingernails and then buffed them against his shirt. “Boy Wonder here is the one who figured out you were gone and started the ball rolling.”
Ted didn’t move. I wasn’t sure whether it was because he didn’t like his new nickname or something else, but there was a nearly imperceptible stiffening. “I stopped by to check on you and you were gone. No note. No nothing.” He didn’t sound happy.
“What was I supposed to write? ‘Gone to kill a Triad boss. C U L8R’?” I spooned up some tomato soup and shifted away from him.
“No. You were supposed to let me help. You weren’t supposed to run off by yourself and almost get killed.” He was definitely still angry.
“I’m the one who got us into this whole mess. I figured I’d better be the one to get us out of it.”
“Children,” Alex said. “You can bicker later in private.” He turned to me. “He put some kind of alert out for your car. Once someone spotted it by the Omni, it was relatively easy to figure out where you were. The tricky part was getting to you.”
“He sounds all cool and collected now, but you should have heard him howling about not being able to go with us on the reconnaissance mission because it was still daylight.” Paul chuckled.
“You weren’t all that calm and collected yourself, Fido,” Alex shot back.
“Stop calling me Fido!” Paul half rose from his chair.
“Everyone be quiet,” Sophie screamed.
Surprisingly, the room fell silent, and everyone turned to look at her. “Stop fighting with each other. That isn’t what needs to happen here. We need to work together. We need to come up with a plan to defeat these things.”
Out of the mouths of babes.
“So does anybody know how we kill these
kiang shi
things?” Ted asked.
“You have to decapitate them and burn them,” Ben said.
I turned and looked at him. He shrugged. “I can use the Internet, too, you know. I also understand about the rice and holding your breath when you fight them. The hacking-to-pieces bit seems a little mean, though.”
“What would you have us do, then?” Alex asked from where he lounged against the breakfast bar. “Let them continue to maraud through our city snacking on our less fortunate brethren?”
