Last Vampire Standing (8 page)

Well, all right. I’d given Triton my bit of what for. I hadn’t expected
any
response from him, so I suppose it was a victory that he’d answered me at all, however briefly.

What could be such a big darn deal that we couldn’t do a mind hookup? Was someone telepathically eavesdropping? Hunting Triton? It would have to be him, because I was a breeze to find. My crazy Covenant stalker did it, which is why Saber insisted on all the security.

Sitting here wondering what kind of danger I was in and where it was coming from wasn’t getting my homework done. Much as I loathed our current assignment on period furniture, I went to my desk and dropped the chain and charm in a tiki motif mug by the monitor. While the system booted, I added fabric softener to the wash load and grabbed a Fig Newton to chew on. Beat chewing on questions about Triton.

I waded into my
History of Furnishings
textbook wondering why anyone had thought heavy styles like baroque looked good. To me, they just looked hulking. And, once you got that furniture into a room, no way did you want to move it out again. Of course, the wealthy had servants to drag furniture around. I wondered how many had suffered hernias. Then again, people weren’t so mobile in earlier times. Family homes were passed down through generations and still were, for that matter. I set my chin on my fist and thought about my own family. I’d been raised with furniture just as chunky as some of the pieces in the book, though not as elaborately carved and costly. The tables and chairs, chests and bedsteads in my family home were sturdy, serviceable. They had to be to stand up to the beating that first my brothers, then my nieces and nephews gave them. Had my family missed the things they couldn’t take when they’d finally fled St. Augustine?

I looked at the full-page photo of an oak trestle table darkened to black brown with age. The surface looked pitted, scarred, beloved. I hesitated, then touched the photo with one fingertip and was jerked back in time.
The children huddled under the table, shooed there by the women. They didn’t cry, but their eyes were huge and frightened
as they peeked at me between their mothers’ skirts. I’d cared for these babies, coddled and laughed with them, but no
more. I was a vampire now, and if they knew not what that meant, they’d been told stories enough to fear me.

I raised my gaze, and my heart bled to see the face of my mother contorted in horror. Her pallor was severe, so much so
that I feared she would collapse. Instead, she gripped a cleaver in her arthritic, trembling hand. Two sisters-in-law, they
who had chided me for not choosing a husband, wielded long knives and regarded me with loathing. My youngest sister-
in-law, the one I best loved, clasped the newest baby to her breast. I ached to touch that fuzzy head, to croon a lullaby.
To be a family again.

“Please, don’t be afraid,” I said over and over. “I’m here to warn you.”

They didn’t heed me. They couldn’t. Their terrified screams begging me to spare them and the children drowned my
anguished voice, and I wept as I slipped out the garden door. They thought me a monster, with no soul, no love, no loyalty
in my heart. They were wrong.

Later, I asked Triton to get them out of town so that King Normand could no longer threaten them, but I relinquished my family that day. I was alone with no one to love and no one to live for. I would survive or find a way to forever die. The memory faded, and I wondered for the first time if I had relatives somewhere. Descendants of my nieces and nephews who would be happy to learn about their ancestors and perhaps to know me. If so, they hadn’t shown up yet, which was telling in itself. I shook off the past and closed the textbook, then about screeched out of my skin when a hand landed on my shoulder. I spun in the old-fashioned swivel desk chair to face Saber.

“Easy, babe, it’s me.”

“Geez, make some noise next time,” I said, my heartbeat still in overdrive, my eyelashes wet with the remnants of tears.

“I did make noise, honey,” he said gently. “Are you okay? Is your vampire hearing on the fritz?”

“My hearing is fine. I was hyperfocused.” I surreptitiously wiped my cheeks dry. Then I noticed that, except for his shoes, he was dressed. I glanced at my dolphin desk clock. “Where are you going at three in the morning?”

“Daytona.”

“But you were just there, like, eighteen hours ago. What happened?”

He rubbed his hand over his whiskered cheek. “The cops found a guy in an alley a block from Ike’s club.”

“Dead?” I asked, rising to hug him.

He shook his head and held me. “The guy is alive for now, but he’s in shock and sporting some vicious fang marks. Not clean or neat.”

“You need to go talk to the victim?”

“More than that. The guy is claiming he was robbed, but he can’t give a coherent description of who lifted his wallet and ring or of who bit him. We’re serving another search warrant on Ike. The Daytona cops are waking a judge now, and we’re planning to hit them right about the time they close at four.”

I stepped out of his arms. “If you’re raiding Hot Blooded while Ike and his nest are awake, I’m coming with you.”

“Cesca, I’ll have a squad of city cops there.”

I shook my head and headed for the bedroom. “Not good enough. Somebody there bit a man, and I might be able to tell who it was. Plus, I can do my energy-draining trick if the natives get obnoxious.”

“No way. I can’t have a civilian at a possible crime scene. Besides, weren’t you going surfing with Neil this morning?”

I paused at the bedroom door. Actually, I’d forgotten about the date with Neil, and this was far more important.

“Surfing can wait, and you can deputize me or something so I won’t be a civilian.”

He frowned but didn’t have a comeback, so I pressed my case.

“I’ll follow you in my car and leave as soon as I know everyone will be safe. I’m going to tail you anyway, so you might as well give in.”

By the time he had his sneakers laced up, I was dressed in blue jeans and a tank top, and ready to kick fang. SIX

007

We sped south on A1A, Saber with his light and siren bubble stabbing the night, me streaking behind in my SSR. I’d never been to Daytona but had heard the drive took an hour or more at normal speed and in normal traffic. I’d bet both fangs we’d be there in thirty-five minutes.

Enough time for my bravado to wane, but not my resolve.

Not that I
wanted
to confront the Daytona Beach vamps. Been there, survived that. Ike’s rich voice oozes over a body like a controlled oil spill, but he’s a quiet flavor of scary next to Laurel. Vampzilla is bossy, bitchy, and wears human bones in her cornrowed hair. The other two vamps I’d met in March were Ike’s muscle. Tower and Zena are very tall, very built, and very loyal to Ike.

Ike had left me alone since our meeting five months ago. Would he take my turning up on his turf with Saber and the Daytona cops as a declaration of war?

If so, I’d just have to talk him down out of the boughs. A vamp had chomped on a human, and that simply wasn’t kosher. Of course, there was the off chance—way off—that the biting had been consensual. In March, I’d also met four blood bunnies that hung out with Ike, and I’d later asked Saber about their bite marks. He’d explained that biting could be consented to during sex. Not an encouraged practice, but the VPA overlooked love bites just as it ignored small nests. Sometimes, bureaucracy bites. Consensual or not, a vampire should never leave a bitee to wander around under a partial thrall. The effect was like turning a drunk loose. Without the upchucking.

Saber killed his light and siren and turned into a parking lot behind a two-story cinder-block building painted Caribbean blue. Not the color choice I pictured for a place called Hot Blooded, but I imagined City Hall controlled the colors of buildings. St. Augustine’s city government did the same.

The parking lot teemed with official vehicles and uniformed men and women from the Daytona Beach police force. I joined Saber, and we headed for a tall, rangy black man wearing a Daytona Beach cop uniform and a scowl.

“Captain Jackson,” Saber said, “this is Cesca Marinelli.”

“I know who she is,” Jackson snarled. “What the hell is she doing here?”

That’s me. Making instant friends wherever I go.

“I’ve deputized her on the good chance she can ID the biter, and we can get out of here fast.”

“How is she gonna do that?”

I smiled, being perfectly pleasant. “I have a sharp sense of smell for blood, Captain Jackson.”

“Just stay out of my way.” He turned the full weight of his gaze on Saber. “Are you clear that this is our operation? You’re here as a consultant for now.”

“You mean until you throw your hands up and dump the mess in my lap?”

“That was Hake’s style. It’s not mine.”

“Then your way will be a nice change,” Saber said.

Jackson blinked, then nodded and handed Saber a photo of a man with ragged, bloody bite marks on one side of his neck.

“Since you know the head vamp, you can assist me in questioning him while my teams conduct the search.”

Saber murmured his agreement.

“We round up all the vamps and any humans still in there and put them at opposite sides of the room. I’ve assigned people with silver ammo to guard the vamps.”

“Good plan.”

Mollified that Saber wasn’t here to upstage him, Jackson seemed to stand down.

“Fine. So you question Ike, and she”—he pointed to my quiet, respectful self—“can do her bloodhound thing.”

“Arf,” I muttered too softly for Jackson to hear.

Saber did hear and shot me a zip-it look.

At Jackson’s signal, one group of officers fanned out to cover the back door while others took up positions with rifles aimed at windows. Another five men marched along the sidewalk to the front entrance, with Jackson leading. Saber and I followed. Tower was on doorman duty. Skin and eyes the color of dark chocolate, he nearly filled the double doorway in height and breadth but wore a flat expression.

Jackson flashed his badge under Tower’s nose. “Daytona Beach police. We have a search warrant.”

“Ike is expecting you.”

Well, of course he was. It’s not like he could’ve missed the circus in his parking lot. I kept quiet and slinked behind Jackson and Saber into a cavernous room dominated by an empty dance floor. Two massive flat panel TVs hung suspended over an elevated DJ booth, and both were tuned to ESPN.

ESPN in a vampire club?

A bar of rich, dark wood sprawled into the shadows on my left, and tiny colored lights winked around the perimeter of the room, maybe twenty feet high. No disco ball here, but the blinking lights gave a strobe effect. One that made Ike’s dark looks more foreboding, even from across the dance floor. He uncoiled from his seat at a cocktail table, and I noticed he wore black dress slacks and a silky black shirt.

Huh? No leather?

I took a quick peek at the other seven vampires seated at the table in a haphazard semicircle. The Scandinavian-featured Zena wore jeans and a tropical-print button-up blouse that looked great with her pale blonde hair and white skin. An older-looking female wore a modest sundress, and a younger one sported a red and white cheerleader outfit.
Rah, rah, Fang U?

Tower and three males I didn’t know wore jeans and shirts; one was built like a linebacker sporting a Florida Gators T-shirt. What was up with the normal clothes? Had they all come fashion forward, or was this costume night?

And
what
was that smell in the air? It wasn’t blood. I didn’t catch the slightest whiff of blood in the room, and I was a shark when it came to that odor. This essence was more a light citrus scent. Oranges? Had Ike installed an air freshening system, or did I smell the fruit the bartender used for drinks?

Captain Jackson finished sizing up the vampires but didn’t seemed fazed by the anger emanating from Ike or by having to cross the expanse of dance floor to reach him. Nope, Jackson strode forth, slapping the warrant against his palm, until he stopped close enough to Ike to crowd him.

“Daytona Beach police.”

“I know who you are, Officer.” Ike held his ground.

“Captain,” Jackson corrected.

“As you see, I have gathered everyone for questioning.”

Jackson’s gaze swept over the assortment of vampires. “There’s no one else in the building?”

Ike waved a hand. “The humans are there, in the booth on the far side of the bar.”

“Is your light-fingered girlfriend over there?”

“Allegedly light-fingered.” Ike paused, looked like he was waging an inner war. Or eating dog poop. “Captain.”

I squinted at the booth, my vamp vision kicking in. Sure enough, four women sat at a barely lit booth, three of them blood bunnies I’d met in March. Last time I’d seen that trio, they’d been dressed like they’d mugged a herd of cows for the leather. Tonight they wore shorts, Capris, and jeans with casual blouses. Maybe this
was
costume night. The last woman in the deepest shadow, was that Donita Ward? All I could see in the dimness was a slim figure with short brown curls scribbling on a clipboard.