“Going to Rosie’s for dinner,” he said. “And no, I’m not stalking you. But I do have a question concerning a woman. Do you know if Emily has a lover?”
Emily was one of the waitresses on the evening shift with me, an aeromancer who enjoyed dazzling the customers with her skills. Considering the favor he had just done me, I didn’t think it would hurt to tell him. “She broke up with her boyfriend around New Year,” I said. “I think he took her for granted, and she got fed up.”
McGregor smiled. “You don’t happen to know her schedule, do you?”
“Same as mine, Thursday through Sunday evenings.”
When we reached the bar, I said, “First drink is on me. Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it. I’d do the same for any damsel in distress.”
I laughed and fell into a fake southern-belle accent. “Why, thank you, kind sir. I am so grateful to have a gentleman defend my honor.”
He winked at me. “And besides, bloodstains are so difficult to get out of a nice blouse like that one.”
“That, too.”
I poured him a beer and a shot, and pointed out an empty table in Emily’s area. He thanked me and took his drinks over there. She gave him a big smile as she approached him to take his order. With a waitress—or a bartender—that might be because she liked him, or because he tipped well. At least she seemed happy to see him.
Shawna and Cindy stopped in later that evening. Cindy ordered a large salad for dinner, and Shawna nibbled on some blood sausage. I told them about my encounter with the Knights.
“That’s the second time I’ve been ambushed on that jogging path,” I said. “It’s not a coincidence.”
“Back to that incident with Lizzy at the library,” Shawna said, “do you really think they wanted to experiment on her?”
I shrugged. “It’s the only thing I can think of. Plenty of witches and mages running around, but they zero in on the only half-Fae at the university? And if they know when the ley line disruptions are scheduled, then it would be easy to take her while she was disabled.”
Both cops nodded. “Makes sense,” Cindy said. Looking over at Shawna, she said, “Tell her about the vamps.”
Shawna took a deep breath. “We’ve found three vampires that appear to have been tortured before they died. I knew one of them, and when I talked to her partner, he said she’d disappeared three days before we found her.”
“Tortured in what way?” I asked.
“Like you said. As though someone was conducting experiments. Burns, cuts, broken bones, but all the victims had residual traces of adhesive from electrodes—on the chest, feet, and head, all in the same spots. Their heads were shaven, as were the chests of the men.”
“How did they eventually die?”
“They were staked. The woman had been raped. We found seminal fluid. All of them had been fed, but not in the previous twenty-four hours before their final death.”
I shuddered to think of sweet, gentle Lizzy being subjected to some sadist’s idea of scientific research.
“I’m not an expert on vampires,” I said, “but I assume there’s a fairly extensive body of knowledge about vampire physiology.”
Shawna pursed her lips, then said, “Some, but not as much as you might think. Very few people have really studied us from a scholarly perspective. Only in the past forty or fifty years have new tools become available. CAT scans, MRI, other stuff. And a lot of it is expensive. But how is a researcher supposed to schedule time on an MRI machine at University Hospital at midnight?”
“Not only that,” Cindy said, “but how do you get a research grant to study a group of people who don’t exist?”
Chapter 13
Noise erupted from the back room where the big-screen TV was. Screams, groans, and cursing. I tried to remember what local or regional sports team might be playing. The local hockey team had missed the playoffs, the university’s basketball season was over, and baseball hadn’t started yet. The local baseball team wasn’t on TV anyway, as far as I knew.
Jenny came out of the crowd gathering at the room’s entrance and said, “You should go take a look. I’ll cover the bar.” The expression on her face was grim.
I fought my way through the crowd until I could see the large TV that dominated the back wall. At first, it looked like a battle scene at night. Bright lights flashed across the screen, punctuated with bright bubbles of explosions. I couldn’t detect any sounds.
“Where is that?” I asked. “Syria?”
“Atlanta,” came the response from half-a-dozen different people.
As I watched, a fireball—unmistakably a magical fireball—arced across the screen and splashed down, spreading fire on the street and the walls of a building. The keen of a vampire on fire could be clearly heard.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Is it a movie or something?”
“National news,” the man standing next to me said. “Mage battle in Atlanta. Looks like some vamps got caught in the crossfire. There was a TV news crew on the scene, and they filmed the whole thing.”
“Tonight?”
“Yeah, just a couple of hours ago.”
Like everyone else, I stood there with my mouth hanging open trying to digest what was happening. After a couple of minutes, the TV cut away to a talking head standing on the street. Everything was quiet.
“Authorities are being tight-lipped about the situation,” the guy with perfect hair and a microphone said. “Our crew counted at least three bodies before police and firefighters moved in and cordoned the area off. To repeat, there was an incident, described by witnesses as involving some kind of energy weapons shooting lightning and at least one flame thrower, on the east side of the Beltline, between what those witnesses described as three different groups of people. There were a lot of people out on a Saturday night in this area with many popular bars and restaurants, and some of them were caught up in the altercation. A number of injured people were transported to area hospitals.”
The picture switched back to the studio, where a blonde with a painted-on smile said, “This incident comes on the heels of reports of an unusual gang war in Dallas. Last night in Dallas’s West End, a battle between what police called two gangs spilled into the popular recreation area. Several witnesses recorded the incident on their cell phones.”
There followed three video clips of a brawl between a group of vamps and a group of shifters, some of whom were in full-wolf shift, but some were in their half-shifted wolfman battle form. To say I was shocked was an understatement. The normal world might think we were watching some kind of hoax, but to those of us in the shadow world, it was our worst nightmare come true. At least some of the norms who saw the battles would know what was going on, and others would want to know more before dismissing it.
Both incidents were playing into the Knights Magica’s hands. I wondered what part they played in that mage battle in Atlanta.
Then the other shoe dropped.
“We also have some footage sent to us by our affiliate in Westport, Oregon. This was shot last fall, but the authorities in Westport censored it. However, it turns out a copy was made and has now surfaced.”
The video lasted less than five minutes, shot from a helicopter, of the vampire battle at the Devil’s Den nightclub when Rodrick Barclay attempted to send George Flynn to the final death. They also showed some video of the battle downtown between vampire factions the night Flynn’s Dorchester restaurant burned. That had been shown on TV previously, but only locally.
Vampires battling vampires might be passed off as just another human gang war, if the combatants didn’t leap twenty feet into the air, twist off their opponents’ heads with their bare hands, or continue fighting after one of their arms was ripped off.
When they cut to several “experts” sitting around a table in a circle, speculating on what all the weird video meant, I fought my way through the crowd and back to the bar. I wasn’t interested in what a bunch of ignorant idiots had to say about a disaster they didn’t understand.
Sam came in about an hour later. That was highly unusual. When he left for the day, he rarely came back. But he was the chairman of the local Otherworld council, officially called the Westport Metropolitan Communal Council.
“Erin, reserve the back room for tomorrow evening.”
“I assume you heard the news,” I said.
Sam rarely cursed, but he let rip with a string that would curdle milk. “Frankie managed to suppress the news last fall,” he finally said, “but obviously she didn’t confiscate every copy of the videos. Now we’re on the national news along with that crap in Atlanta and Dallas. What’s next? A mage battle in the halls of Congress?”
“There are a lot of Illuminati in Washington,” I said. Sam shot me a poisonous look. I shrugged. “Just because Rudolf Heine isn’t there anymore doesn’t mean the Illuminati are going to fade away. And what I’ve seen here in Westport makes me think the Knights are hunting the remnants of the Illuminati, and especially the Hunters.”
Four young mages that I didn’t recognize came in a few days later and took a table near the recreation area—where the pool tables and the dart boards were. They looked like university students but were a little too clean cut, and their civilian clothes were a little too new and starched. I had worked at a bar near a military base once, and I noticed that out of uniform, U.S. Marines and Knights Magica looked a lot alike. No one but me seemed to pay them any particular attention.
I observed that all of them sat in such a way that they could watch both the front door and the bartender—me.
Jenny stopped by their table, handed them menus, and took their drink orders. I waited for her to come over to the bar.
“I’ll bet those guys are Knights,” I said.
“Oh, really? A black lager, two cream ales, and a Harp.” Jenny had been waiting tables at Rosie’s for fifty years, and very little ruffled her. “The younger ones are new, but the older guy has been coming in for about three weeks. Nice, always polite, tips about average.”