“All right,” he said. “The cops are going to want to talk to us. Let’s make it quick.”
“You used magic to toss a car across the street,” Keomany said. “They’re going to want to do more than talk.”
“We don’t have time for that,” Octavian said, looking past her toward the police. “If they try to detain us, I’ll cast a . . .”
His words trailed off. Beyond the grieving woman kneeling by her dead love, beyond the friends clustered under their umbrellas bearing witness, beyond the policemen and their car with its swirling blue lights, he saw a new light.
“Something’s burning,” he said.
Firelight bloomed in the sky, making orange and black shadows on the storm clouds. Back the way they had come, near the beach, a fire had broken out. Keomany turned to look at it and the cops and others noticed them staring east, toward the water, and they all glanced that way as well.
“God damn it,” one of the cops said. “What the fuck is
this
, now?”
Octavian nudged Keomany toward the car, and they hurried toward it. The older of the two cops, a graying guy who moved like an ex-soldier, turned and saw them.
“Where do you two think you’re going?” he asked.
Octavian made a fist, feeling the magic surge through him, just in case he needed it.
“To have a look at the fire,” he said. “One of you want to come along? There could be people in trouble.”
“That’s the fire department’s job,” the former military man said, his chin high, all about protocol and authority.
“Minutes could mean lives lost,” Keomany said. “There are things happening in this town none of us understand, Officer. We just want to help.”
The cop studied them, but only for a second. Octavian saw the thought process in his eyes. The officer wondered if they were trouble, but then decided that if they were, he was more than capable of dealing with them.
“Tony,” he said, turning to his young partner, a twenty-something guy who looked like he’d been in one too many bar fights and wouldn’t hesitate to start another. “Call in the . . .” He seemed about to use some kind of dismissive word for the dead man, then glanced at Roland’s weeping widow. “Cover the body and then call this in. They’ll send backup and someone from the coroner’s office.”
Octavian didn’t have the heart to tell him that an examination of the crime scene wasn’t going to turn up any evidence that made sense to anyone.
“Let’s go,” the cop said, walking over to the car.
Octavian climbed into the front seat of his car. Keomany seemed about to offer the passenger seat to the cop, but he opened the back door and slid in without hesitation.
“What a Godforsaken night,” the cop said.
Octavian agreed, but did not respond. He started up the car. As he pulled away from the curb and did a U-turn, he glanced at the people out in the rain with their umbrellas, watching as Tony the cop covered Roland’s withered corpse with a plastic tarp from the trunk of the police car, like they had skipped straight from death to funeral with nothing in between.
“Now that we’re all cozy, in out of the rain,” the graying cop said, “why don’t you tell me who you are and what brings you to Hawthorne.”
Octavian glanced in the rearview mirror, then over at Keomany. He often ran into people who recognized his face or name. To some he was famous, and to others notorious. It troubled him more to be celebrated than to be despised, because the people who hated him had clear motives. They were easy to understand. They hated vampires or the supernatural in general, or they thought that his magic meant he was in league with Satan and ought to be burned at the stake, or worse. The people who loved, or even worshipped, him were harder to understand. Some were simply openminded and understood that he only wanted to help, but others admired him for the same reasons the narrow-minded hated him . . . because he had once been a killer and a blood-drinker, a warrior. Or because he wielded magic, and they hungered for some of that power for themselves.
When people didn’t know him, that could make things easier, or it could make things harder.
“My name is Peter Octavian,” he said, glancing in the rearview mirror again. “My friend is Keomany Shaw. You have some dangerous magic happening in your town. Keomany . . . sometimes she can sense that sort of thing. We’re here to help.”
“Dangerous
magic
?” the cop asked, practically sneering.
Octavian nodded. “You don’t believe in magic?”
“Not much choice, the way the world is these days,” the cop said, his disapproval evident. “But I don’t have to like it.”
“No, you don’t,” Octavian agreed.
The cop laughed. “As long as we’re agreed on that. On the other hand, after a day like today, I’ll take help where I can get it.”
Neither Octavian nor Keomany replied.
Octavian drove them down to Shore Road and turned left, and they saw the burning building instantly. Some kind of music club, complete with old-fashioned marquee. People were helping each other across the street toward the boardwalk along the beach. Some were bleeding and others were coughing from the smoke that poured out of the front doors of the club. Flames had engulfed the upper floor and burst through the windows. Broken glass littered the street. The rain hissed as it touched the flames. But Octavian’s focus was on the fire itself, which burned a sickly orange but had within it threads of greenish flame that were not found in nature.
“Son of a bitch,” the cop muttered. “It’s just getting worse, isn’t it?”
“What’s your name, officer?” Keomany asked.
“Jim Connelly.”
“You may not like magic, Officer Connelly,” Octavian said, “but we can help if you’ll let us.”
Octavian pulled the car to the curb and killed the engine.
“Fuck, yeah,” Connelly said as he popped the door and jumped out. “Help away.”
The three of them hurried toward the confused crowd, many of whom were still spilling from the burning club. The smoke mixed with the rain and made it hard to breathe. Wet ash made the pavement slippery.
A black girl ran up to them, grabbing Officer Connelly by the arm.
“Oh, thank God,” she said, frantic, her face smeared with soot and tears. “My friend Makayla . . . she’s still in there. You’ve gotta get her out. Those fucking crazy people are going to burn to death in there, and they’re not going to let her out. Help her!”
“What crazy people?” Officer Connelly asked. “Did someone start the fire?”
The girl threw up her hands. “I don’t know. It just . . . we were dancing. Everyone was dancing and it was totally amazing. Then it got out of control. People started fighting, like really just beating the shit out of each other. The fire started during the fight, back at the bar, all the alcohol went up so fast, but they kept fighting. One guy . . . oh, God, one guy clawed this other crazy bastard’s eye out. And they started to look like . . . their teeth were all sharp and they just looked wild, like animals. And they’re not coming out. They’re still fighting! Makayla got beaten up. I don’t know if she’s conscious. She’s going to die if you don’t help her!”
Octavian touched Officer Connelly’s arm. “We’ve got this.”
Connelly looked at him in surprise. “You sure?”
“Just remember we’re on your side,” Keomany told him.
Octavian started toward the club, weaving through the people still staggering out. Keomany joined him, and they heard Connelly on his police radio, calling in to report the fire and the violence. Already they could hear fire trucks screaming in the distance.
“Be careful!” the girl called to them. “They went totally nuts. They’ll kill you.”
“We’ll be all right,” Keomany called back to her.
“Just watch out,” the girl said. “It’s not just the crazy people. The vampire’s still in there, too.”
Octavian stopped short and turned back to stare at the girl.
“What vampire?”
CHAPTER 7
THE
patients in the psych unit at Hawthorne Union Hospital were having a long night, which meant that for the staff, it was going to feel like an eternity. Dr. Jenny O’Neil hated stormy nights almost as much as she hated the full moon. There were those who attempted to dismiss the effect that the lunar cycle had on psychiatric patients, but as far as she was concerned, they were idiots who had never had to spend the night in a hospital psych unit when the moon was full. Lightning storms had a similar effect, though not as pronounced.
Tonight, though . . . it was worse than any full moon. Tonight the patients were going bugfuck crazy.
“Marlon, help me out,” Jenny said, beckoning to the chief orderly, a devastatingly handsome man with milk chocolate skin.
“What do you need, Dr. O’Neil?” Marlon asked as he joined her at the nurses’ station.
The chief orderly stood six foot six. His nose had been broken more than once, and showed it, but that imperfection only made him more attractive. Jenny had to pretend she didn’t notice. But she had to pretend a lot of things to get through a day on this job, the first of which was that the potentially violent patients didn’t scare the crap out of her. Jenny knew how to fight. You didn’t grow up in a house with the neighborhood’s notorious O’Neil brothers—all older than her—and not learn how to defend yourself. Add to that the self-defense classes that she had taken in the early years of her residency in psychiatric medicine, and Jenny had become capable of taking care of herself. But at five foot two and a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet, she still appreciated having monstrously powerful orderlies around to back her up when things got out of hand.
Tonight, for instance.
“We need to take precautions,” Jenny said. “This place is sounding like some Victorian asylum tonight, and I don’t want us losing control. We need to get on top of it now.”
Marlon nodded firmly. He didn’t give her the patronizing smile some of the orderlies did, looking like they wanted to pat her on the head like she was a little girl. Those guys inevitably ended up learning that they could get hurt on the job if they didn’t take her seriously. But Marlon had been on the unit for six years, and had seen a few things. At thirty-four, Jenny might be nearly a decade younger, but he respected her both as his superior and as a formidable woman, and if he caught any of the other orderlies doing any less, he made their lives miserable. Every day she wanted to kiss him for it, but never would.
Besides, you’d need a ladder,
she thought, as always. The joke helped keep her focused on the job.
“Elissa, let’s have the patient roster,” Jenny called to the nurse in charge of the station for the shift.
Mid-forties, with a burnt blond dye job, Elissa had been a psych nurse for twenty years. Nothing surprised her and nothing scared her, and Jenny admired that. She needed that kind of no-nonsense attitude, especially on a night like tonight. It was a good team. No matter how out of control the patients got, she thought they would make it through until morning without any major trouble.
Elissa handed her a clipboard with a listing of all of the patients currently on the unit, their diagnosis, current status, and medication schedule. All of that was on computer, and some of the doctors carried around the small pad computers to keep track of it all, but Jenny liked having something to write on, something she could tack to the wall at the nurses’ station if necessary. Something concrete. Any medical instructions or comments would end up in the electronic file anyway, courtesy of Elissa, but Jenny liked paper, especially when she wanted them all to put their heads together.
Thunder boomed outside, loud enough that they could hear it even in the corridor.
Hear it?
Jenny thought.
I can
feel
it.
The rumble lingered for several seconds, and Jenny smiled at Elissa and Marlon.
“I hate storms like this,” the nurse said, looking uneasy.
“Me, too,” Jenny said. Since childhood, thunderstorms had sent her scurrying under her covers or into the arms of her father. But her father had died of an aneurysm two years ago, and there were no covers for her here at the hospital. Only patients who were far more troubled by the storm than she was.
“Walk with me,” she said, holding the clipboard and coming out from behind the nurses’ station.
Marlon and Elissa flanked her and the trio headed deeper into the secure wing of the hospital’s third-floor psychiatric unit. There were two rooms outside the secure area, one of them currently occupied by a fifteen-year-old girl with a penchant for cutting herself. She’d had another incident this morning, this one especially bloody, and though she seemed rational now, she needed close supervision.
“The Langan girl hasn’t shown any reaction to the storm, but I want a bed check every half hour,” Jenny said quietly, glancing at Elissa. “No need to disturb her, but make sure she hasn’t gotten her hands on anything sharp, and that she’s doing all right.”
“Of course,” Elissa said.
“Marlon,” Jenny went on, “I know one of your guys has gone through the room, but I’d like you to go through it yourself. It’s a weird night and I don’t want to take any chances.”