Home > Flame in the Dark (Soulwood #3)(10)

Flame in the Dark (Soulwood #3)(10)
Author: Faith Hunter

“Shooter in a car. Drive-by. Handgun. No casualties. They already got him.” To me she said, “If you’ll follow me. And keep your head down.”

I was still fastening my vest as we wove through the lot, our feet silent on the pavement. I caught snatches of conversation between cops as we jogged:

“Twenty-five rounds located so far. Most in the restaurant’s wall.”

“Way more casings in the street than twenty-five.”

“No shit?”

“Way more.”

“Witnesses’re in the empty building next door.”

“Two bottles of perfectly good vodka hit and shattered.”

“I hear the vodka set off a kitchen fire.”

“Singed the hair off a cook but didn’t touch her scalp.”

“Ten-ninety-ones are to stay in place until CSI and the MEs are finished.”

“Medical examiners are here?”

“I know, right? Weird.”

Ten-ninety-ones were dead bodies, in Knoxville PD radio codes. The stink of gunfire and burned hair and scorched building fouled the air. I looked around for fire trucks and decided the trucks must have pulled up to the restaurant from the back, from the street on the other side. EMS units were lined up in the roadway, uniformed officers standing guard at the door to the restaurant, visible in the glaring headlights. Heavily armed SWAT officers were inside and out. Shadows flickered on the walls and the asphalt, oversized, bulked, armed.

“Over here.” The uniformed cop jerked on my sleeve, pulling me against a marked vehicle. She pointed to a black limo across the street. “In that one.” It wasn’t a long limo, but a short one. The vehicle looked heavy, as if armored. “Don’t expect me to get any closer to the fangheads,” she said. “I like the blood in my veins where it belongs. Maintain cover position until we clear the street and the buildings.”

“Thanks,” I said, “and I feel the same way about vampires. But you don’t say no to Ming of Glass.” Crouching, I stepped off the curb into the street and raced over. The chauffeur got out, hunkered down like I was, and opened the back door. I did not want to get in that limo, sit on that leather, touch anything with bare skin. The thought of dead possum and maggots wiggling on my bare feet nearly made me gag as I ducked inside and sat, hands in my lap, my eyes adjusting as the door closed on me with a solid thunk.

“Special Agent Maggot,” a familiar voice said.

“Fanghead Yummy,” I said. Which was totally impolite, not that I cared as much as I might once have. Except that the inside light came on and Ming was sitting beside the blond vampire. “Ming of Glass,” I said, not apologizing, though the words I’m sorry wriggled in the back of my throat like a squirrel in a trap, trying to get out. Mama might fear vampires, but she would be polite to Satan himself. I’d be polite, though I had a momentary vision of Mama meeting the devil in the middle of an ice storm, the Angel of the Morning hovering on bat wings at the end of Mama’s shotgun.

“You find us amusing?” Ming asked.

I blurted a half-strangled laugh. “No, ma’am. I just imagined my mama meeting, ummm, you.”

“Your mother fears Mithrans?”

My laughter died. “My mama survived her worst nightmare. Now she don’t fear nothing. You called me over here?” It wasn’t exactly true, but it sounded good.

“Do you feel maggots in my limousine?”

I thought about lying, since I’d already insulted the chief blood-sucker in Knoxville. “Not through my clothes. I thought you were inside Pierced Dreams when the shooting took place.”

“I was just arriving. I was delayed. If one of my kind was behind this shooting, is there any way you or your fellow nonhuman police officers could tell?”

“The cats aren’t trackers. They’re sight hunters. We don’t have our own K9 paranormal dog. We don’t have a werewolf on the team, and that would be the best nose were-critter.”

“If I flew a werewolf in, could it—could he track this shooter?”

“I doubt it. Too many scent patterns.” I paused.

“You have thought of something,” Ming said.

“Maybe.” I frowned. It would be against regulations. But PsyLED didn’t always go by regs. And Jane Yellowrock had a tame werewolf . . . “Hmmm.”

“Tell me what you are thinking,” Ming said, her voice full of velvet persuasion, a vampire mesmerism.

I looked her in the eye. “Really? You’un gonna try that on me? ’Cause it don’t work.”

“So I see.” Ming sat back against the leather, making it sigh like flesh still alive. She motioned to Yummy. “Go with her. Provide assistance as needed. PsyLED will bring you back before dawn.” Ming looked at me, her eyes intense, giving a final little push with her voice and her mind. “You will bring her back before dawn.”

“I’ll be glad to give Yummy a ride, but if traffic stalls us on the highway and she burns up, you’un’re paying to have my truck fumigated. I hear it’s mighty hard to get out the burned vamp stink.”

Yummy made a strangled sound that might have been laughter.

Ming’s eyes went wide and then she burst out laughing. She was still chuckling when Yummy followed me out of the limo into the exhaust-laden air and the too-bright lights. “Girl, you are either stupid or you got big brass ones,” Yummy said.

I decided that no reply was the wisest reaction this time. Not that I’d been wise for the last few minutes. Occam appeared at my side, ushering us into the shadows cast by streetlights against the ornate brick wall of a building. He was walking fine now, as he took in Yummy as part of his constant scan of the street and buildings and law enforcement rushing around. Around us, Old City’s Christmas decorations glowed, a festive red and white this year. To me he said, “Uniforms and feds found the greatest concentration of casings. They think the shooter stood in the greenspace there.” He jerked his chin to a couple of winter-leafless dogwoods and evergreen plantings at the edge of a roofed overhang. “There’s some land. Rick wants you to get a read.”

The patch of earth was maybe ten feet by twenty. “That little bit of land? You’uns—you’re kidding.”

“Nope. I got your blanket outta your truck.” He held out my faded pink blanket and I took it, uncertain for two reasons. I had locked my truck, and the blanket suggested that Occam either had a key or owned and knew how to use a slim-jim. And I didn’t like reading city land. It was usually dead land.

Yummy leaned into Occam and breathed deeply. I realized she was taking his scent. “Wereleopard. I am still eager to taste you.”

Occam turned his eyes from me to her and said, “No. Again. No.”

Yummy laughed and her voice took on that persuasive tone, low and liquid. “You might change your mind. Such liaisons have always been things of pleasure and joy.”

I wondered if that meant that Yummy and Occam had ever—

“Come on.” Occam turned his back on her in a catty insult, speaking to me. “I got a camera for you to work with.”

Yummy’s eyes lit up in what must have been relish at the insult. As if she found Occam even more interesting and delightful prey now than before.

“Nell? Camera,” Occam said.

The camera was a ruse to keep the humans among us from having a fear reaction at a paranormal person. I was listed in Unit Eighteen as an undifferentiated paranormal, meaning that I wasn’t among the short list of paranormals with known powers, gifts, and disadvantages—like vampires catching fire in sunlight. Yummy knew I wasn’t human because she had seen me communing with the land once. And because she knew Jane Yellowrock. Reading the land in such a public place might tell everyone everywhere that I wasn’t human, and . . . well, I hadn’t told my mama or daddy yet. So holding a camera was a ruse.

Keeping to the semiprotection of the brick wall, I followed Occam down the street to the winter-bare trees. And the ten-by-twenty plot of land was revealed to be the brick-paved outdoor eating area of a restaurant, one with cement planters for the trees and greenery. There were rounds everywhere, each marked with a numbered yellow evidence marker. Tables and chairs were overturned; drinks were pooled and reeking of alcohol. There had been people eating out here when the shooting started, outside in the cold, which was just stupid to my way of thinking. But there was nothing for me to read, no land in sight. I looked at Occam and crossed my arms over my chest. Yummy was watching the byplay with the same kind of amusement that a human might display when watching monkeys in a zoo.

Occam looked around. Sighed. “Right. Okay. I see.” He handed me a camera. “Try anyway.”

I threw the blanket back at him and sat on the cement edge of a planter. Placed the camera on the ground prominently in front of me as if it had a purpose. I dug my fingers through six inches of mulch and stuck them into the soil. It was good-quality potting soil mixed with topsoil. There was a nice concentration of nutrients. One spot where some stupid human had dumped in a cup of coffee. I boosted the tree, just in case the winter was long and cold, and withdrew my hand. “Nothing. But why do they think the shooter stood here? The rounds probably popped off the roof.” I looked up. So did Occam and Yummy, who pursed her mouth.

She laced her fingers together, bent her knees, and said, “Come on, cat. I’ll boost you up and you can pull me up. Maggot can wait down here.”

I spotted Rick in a group of suited men and women, mostly Secret Service and feds. “I’ll be eavesdropping over there.” Occam didn’t acknowledge my comment. Without looking, he took a running start and bounded into Yummy’s hand. The vampire tossed him up and forward and he touched down on the roof with cat grace. In his cat form that leap would have been easy all on his own.

Yummy backed up and raced in, leaping onto the planter and pushing off with one foot. Occam reached out over the edge and grabbed her arm, pulling her up. They collided, fell out of sight, and hit the roof. There was little doubt they had landed flat, together. Yummy laughed, the sound delighted. Teasing. Sexual.

A strange feeling opened up in my middle at her laughter. I was pretty sure I had never heard laughter like that before, but I knew what it was and what it meant. The strange feeling in my rooty middle went wide and empty at the sound, sad and betrayed. Until Occam said, “No,” his tone cold and full of threat. “Look away from me.”

The vampire made a pouting sound. “You take all the fun out of the hunt. Now put away your toy before we have an incident.”

“Put away your fangs first.”

The frozen tone of his voice eased some of the odd emptiness inside me. If there had ever been something between them it was long gone. I heard nothing else until the sounds of them rising reached me, and they walked across the metal roof. Then I heard them repeating what sounded like the “hands and push”/”leap and catch” being replayed as they attained the roof of the two-story building next over, one that shared a wall with the restaurant with no land in front.

   
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