One of them might have been the vampire, but they were all so vicious she could not tell the difference.
“Like we talked about,” Octavian said.
“Damn straight,” Keomany agreed.
She planted her feet, let the heat of the fire buffet her, trying to burn her and suffocate her all at once. Monstrous, it roared, flames continuing to consume the club, working their way toward the corners they had not yet touched. The middle of the room had become a bonfire of tables and portions of the collapsed ceiling. Somewhere glass shattered, the heat blowing out windows.
Keomany closed her eyes, reaching one hand toward the hole in the roof and the other out toward the inferno where the bar had once stood. She had become far more adept at working with air and earth, with roots and plants, but she had dealt with fire before. Weather could be influenced, but never really controlled. Still, she had to try.
With a single exhaled breath, she thrust her spirit down into the earth, extending herself, searching for a place beyond the reach of the chaos storm that had begun to unravel Hawthorne. She felt the fire. Felt the rain. Tried to smother the one with the other. The wind howled inside the club, and that was not at all what she wanted. It only made the flames leap higher, ravage the walls faster, leap from table to table to fabric seat. But the rain came with it, this strange, warm rain whose source was a perverted nature. Still, rain was rain, and the fire did not like it. She could not bring more rain, but she could focus it, draw the clouds above more tightly together so that the moisture falling elsewhere in town would, for a few moments, fall almost entirely in this one place.
Impossibly, the fire raged higher, as though fighting back. But she had seen the blue core of the flames and knew that there was magic in them. She opened her eyes, and through the hole in the roof she saw blue lightning dancing inside the clouds that were colliding above the club, and she could picture it now . . . blue lightning strikes, blue fire eruptions. Had this been a mistake? Would it only bring more lightning?
“I can’t control the fire!” she shouted, trying to be heard over the blaze.
Her voice was met with snarls and hyena laughter. Keomany turned in time to see a man running toward her, blood on his hands and smeared on his mouth. His eyes were wild and his teeth jagged and plentiful as he lunged for her. No time to dodge. He would be on her in a moment.
The beast-man cried out in pain as green electrical fire seized him, a sphere of magic that crackled like real flame. He struggled against it, but to no avail. The sphere contracted quickly and Keomany heard the air hissing out of it, and a moment later he tumbled to the floor, free of the sphere but unconscious. One of his legs looked broken. She had no sympathy.
“Peter!” she called.
Octavian had cast the spell that saved her. A man and woman hung ten feet from the ground in a similar sphere, all the oxygen being stolen from them. A shambling fat Asian man careened toward him from behind. With the noise of the fire and the entire sky’s worth of rain pouring down upon them, Keomany could not be sure Octavian heard him. She reached down into the earth again. This time, so far away, she felt contact, just the lightest touch of the goddess. With a gesture, she brought the floorboards to life. Roots and branches sprang from long-dead wood, reaching up to twine around the gargantuan man. Flames raced along the floor and began to spiral along the roots, and she knew her mistake at once. Trapped in the prison her witchery had just made, the man would die.
“Something’s controlling the fire!” she called to Octavian.
The mage shot out his left hand and an arch of golden light sliced across the club, knocking the other two beastmen from their feet. Then he spun around, staring at the blue core of the fire, and raised both hands.
“Vodilna roke odšla,”
he chanted.
“Pusti naravi z naravo. Je treba očistiti zunanjih vplivov!”
The light that burst from his hands and his eyes turned from gold to amber to blinding red. The wind that flashed through the club had more power than the storm and it shook the building to its burning rafters, but when it had passed, Keomany stared at the ring of fire in the ceiling above.
The blue fire had gone, leaving only ordinary flames behind. The rain had already begun to subdue the blaze.
“This I can work with!” she said, grinning, twirling, and dancing, singing a song that she often hummed in the orchard.
The wind died but the rain came on. The fire began to gutter like a million dying candles, hissing as it subsided.
In seconds, the blaze had gone out.
“Well done,” Octavian said.
With a wave of his hand, the crackling energy sphere vanished and the two lunatics within fell to the ground with a crash. The two he had cast aside with a concussion spell were beginning to stir.
“No sign of a vampire?” Keomany asked.
“None,” Octavian replied. “These people have been cursed somehow, turned savage. It may fade or it may not. Their best bet is us being able to stop the chaos here. We do that, and they should be all right. But they’re not vampires.”
“The one guy who nearly got me had some nasty teeth. Maybe that girl outside just thought she saw a vampire,” Keomany said.
Octavian nodded. “Maybe.”
But as firefighters and EMTs began to enter the burned wreckage of the club, Keomany walked farther inside, toward the motionless bodies scattered on the floor.
“Careful,” a firefighter called to her. “This place is unsafe. The roof could come down on our heads. You folks should wait outside.”
Octavian glanced at her and they shared a moment of quiet irony. They had just extinguished the blaze and put down the rabid freaks who’d been tearing each other apart in here, and he thought maybe they should wait outside?
Off to her left, just to the left of the stage, something moved. Keomany looked toward a platform that had been rolled off to one side, perhaps used for some performances but not others, and saw a figure rise. Clothes singed, coppery red hair wild and unkempt, the girl might have been nineteen or twenty. Though slender and of average height, she carried another girl in her arms as easily as she might have cradled an infant. Beautiful, her ocean-blue eyes bright, she walked toward Keomany and laid the other girl on the floor.
The injured girl coughed harshly, smoke inhalation having done its work. With her short-cropped black hair and the ring through her lip, she fit the description of Makayla, the friend who’d been left behind by the panicked girl outside.
“She’ll be all right. Just see she gets oxygen. Too much smoke,” the redhead said. She hesitated and started to walk away.
“Hold on,” Keomany said, reaching for the redhead’s arm. “That corner was on fire. How the hell did you—”
The copper-haired girl spun, silently baring fangs.
Keomany swore and stepped back. The vampire’s eyes flashed a warning and she picked up her pace, hurrying out of the burned shell of the club. She could have turned to mist or rain, could have been a mouse or a fly, but she seemed determined to walk out on her own two feet. Keomany turned and saw Octavian talking to two EMTs.
“Peter!” she called. She wanted to shout,
Here’s the vampire
, but since the vamp girl didn’t seem to be hurting anyone, she didn’t want to freak out the emergency workers. But the mage did not seem to hear her. “Hey, Octavian!”
Octavian spun around, eyes narrowed, alarmed by the edge in her voice. It had been a long night already, and they had known from the moment they’d entered Hawthorne that the chaos would only get worse.
Keomany gestured toward the copper-haired girl, but even as Octavian started across the scorched club to pursue her, the vampire halted in her tracks. She turned to stare at Keomany and then spotted Octavian approaching.
“You’re Peter Octavian?” the vamp girl asked, her eyes filled with hope.
Confused, Keomany studied the two of them. Once upon a time, Octavian had been a vampire, and for a time he had led a group comprising both humans and vampires, trying to protect humanity from vampires who refused to give up the bloodthirsty ways of the past. He still worked with the UN, aiding their efforts to hunt rogue vampires.
“I don’t know you,” Octavian said, studying the girl warily.
“I’m Charlotte,” the vampire replied.
“Are you registered?” Octavian asked.
Charlotte glanced away.
“You’re a rogue,” he said ominously. “Why aren’t you running?”
She flinched as though the words pained her. “Maybe because I’m hoping that instead of killing me, you’ll actually help me. Someone has to.”
Octavian hesitated. Keomany inched closer to him, just in case the vampire girl tried anything—not that he would need her help for one vampire.
“Look,” Charlotte said, her anger flaring again. “I didn’t kill any of these people. I need your help. Come on. Seriously, don’t you have bigger problems than one vampire girl who hasn’t signed the Covenant?”
Octavian hesitated. Charlotte looked to Keomany.
“She has a point,” Keomany said, keeping her voice quiet. Already the firefighters and EMTs were starting to pay close attention to this exchange, and she didn’t want anyone to get hurt trying to interfere. Officer Connelly would be waiting for them outside, and the cops would be tempted to start blaming some of this nastiness on Charlotte once they found out she was a rogue.
“All right,” Octavian said. “We’ll talk, but not here.”
“There’s a café up around the corner that looked like it might still be open,” Keomany said. She’d spotted it as they’d driven through the town center, a place called After Midnight Café.
“Fantastic,” Charlotte said, flashing a pouty, sharp-edged smile. “I’d kill for a coffee.”
Octavian narrowed his eyes.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” the vampire girl said, rolling her eyes in perfect teenager style as she turned and marched out of the club. “It’s a friggin’ figure of speech.”
Keomany arched an eyebrow, amused. Octavian only looked troubled, but they followed the girl out into the warm blue rain and the burgeoning chaos of night in Hawthorne. Daybreak could not come soon enough.
CHAPTER 8
MILES
sat on a floral-patterned, high-backed chair in his mother’s living room. The fabric smelled of flowery perfume and when he had sat down, it had exhaled the scent of dust and old age. It had been a quiet sort of house, even when Miles had been growing up, used to long silences or to stillness broken only by the voices of soap opera actors and news anchors. His mother liked to have the television on for company when she did her cleaning or folded laundry.
Had
liked to have the TV on.
Had
being the operative word.
His mother was past tense now. History. Past tense, past tension, passed on.
“Shit, Ma,” he whispered to himself, scraping his palm across his eyes, swiping at a fresh trickle of tears.
He had been keenly aware of her mortality for years. Since the death of his father, when Miles had been only a boy, the idea that his mother would one day follow had haunted him. But in a way her presence had also comforted him when he had been lured into dark musings about his own eventual fate. His grandparents had been old and had passed away when he was small. But sad as they might have been, their deaths had seemed natural and ordinary. His father’s, less so.
Now, though, with his mother gone . . . he was next in line. Miles knew he wasn’t old, but it felt to him as though the Grim Reaper had touched his hand tonight, had slipped up beside him and breathed the same air. With no generation ahead of him now, he felt a new intimacy with death that he had always feared. It had come for his father so long ago, but now it had come for his mother as well, and too soon. She had still enjoyed cooking, still read her mystery novels, still painted flowers and ducks and the old grist mill from time to time. She had friends who loved her, including Tricia Bowker, who walked with her four mornings a week to keep their hearts pumping. Tricia would probably stop walking now, Miles thought.
With a shudder, he buried his face in his hands, bent over in the chair, trying to make sense of what he had lost today. He remembered coming in from sledding with his friends and his mom making him hot chocolate and indulging him when he wanted to stick his feet under the baseboard heater to get them warm. She had brought him shopping with her and he had sat patiently inside the circular clothing racks, hidden from other shoppers in a forest of dresses or blouses, waiting for her to finish. He remembered his birthday parties and how each one had seemed quirky and different; one year, they’d had a séance. His mother had loved parties and didn’t mind if the other parents thought she was a little strange.
Miles had never told her about what happened the Christmas after the séance birthday party. He had been eleven . . . certainly old enough to tell the difference between dreams and the waking world. After a long Christmas day, his mother had gone to sleep and his Aunt Betty and her second husband, Uncle Artie—who had come in from Colorado for the holiday—were crashed out in the living room, nodding off in front of the television. Miles had gone off to the bathroom for a quick pee before bed, heavy with Christmas dinner and the exhaustion of postpresent ecstasy. Emerging from the bathroom, he had nearly run into Tim McConville in the hallway.