“Something interesting as well?” Octavian asked.
“You’ll have to talk to the chief about that,” Tagliatelli replied. “Sorry about drawing on you, though. We’re just not used to . . . y’know, magic, around here. Good or bad. I think I’ve drawn my weapon once since I became a cop, but with all of the craziness right now, we’re all pretty on edge. A patient went nuts a little while ago, beat some people up and took off. I mean, why not just check yourself out. It’s like the whole town’s an insane asylum. Makes the psych unit look like a bunch of accountants talking numbers.”
“Understandable,” Octavian said. “It’s an ugly day.”
“I’ll take you up there,” Tagliatelli said, leading the way through the waiting room and past the reception desk.
Octavian gestured to Charlotte and Keomany, and the three of them followed the cop into the heart of the ER. He could feel the fear and smell the sickness around him and he wished he could stop and do whatever he could for each person who was ill or wounded or crushed by fear, but the only way to help them all was to put an end to the chaos.
Tagliatelli gestured to a hospital security guard. The man nodded and went out to monitor the waiting room. Out of the corner of his eye, when he knew her attention was elsewhere, Octavian watched Charlotte. The vampire had been twitchy and skittish all morning, and he knew it wasn’t just the agitation of the chaos in the air or a hunger for blood. Charlotte had been made into a vampire by Cortez, and he subscribed to an antiquated idea of vampirism. At their core, vampires were shapeshifters, able to change themselves on a molecular level. For more than a thousand years they had been infected with beliefs ingrained in them by the church, purposely laced through their community to limit their power. They’d been made to believe that there were only certain forms they could take when they shapeshifted, and that the sun would burn them, the latter a form of psychosomatic suicide—as shapeshifters, if they believed they would turn to fire and ash, they had.
Octavian and his long-dead lover, Meaghan Gallagher, had helped to change all of that, to free vampires—shadows—from the limits the church’s cunning had placed on them. But some had enjoyed being the creatures of nightmare the church had painted them as, who had loved being monsters. Predators. Cortez and his ilk shunned the sunlight, cleaving to the vampire myths of old.
And so Octavian watched Charlotte. She had been turned and taught by Cortez, but he wondered if she had spent much time in the sun since she had fled his coven. He had a feeling she had experimented very little with walking beneath the sun, perhaps afraid to experiment. Even with the storm blotting out all but the dimmest light that filtered through the clouds, she seemed troubled by it. Now that they were indoors she seemed to have settled a bit. He hoped she could get over any skittishness quickly. He needed to be able to rely on her.
They reached the elevator, where nurses and patients waited.
“I’m sorry, folks,” Tagliatelli said. “We need to get up to the third floor immediately. Police business.”
“They don’t look like police,” a craggy-faced old nurse said, staring at Octavian and his friends.
“Never said they were,” Tagliatelli replied simply, ignoring the woman’s glare.
The elevator doors opened and the four of them stepped on. None of the patients waiting looked to be in dire straits, so Octavian didn’t object when Tagliatelli held up a hand to prevent anyone else from boarding. The doors shushed closed and the officer hit the button for the third floor.
As they ascended, Tagliatelli cast appreciative glances at Keomany and Charlotte.
“What are you two, his personal assistants?” the cop asked, trying to hide his lecherous implications behind an innocent look that didn’t quite work.
Keomany shot him a withering glance. She pointed a finger at herself.
“Earthwitch,” she said, then pointed at Charlotte. “Vampire.”
The cop flinched and turned a fearful gaze on Charlotte, who grinned widely enough to reveal her fangs and waggled her fingers in a childlike wave.
“Jesus,” Tagliatelli said, facing forward and staring straight ahead as the elevator eased to a halt.
When the doors opened he practically jumped off. Octavian waited for Keomany and Charlotte to step out before he followed. Tagliatelli rushed ahead of them, no longer bothering to try to make small talk. That was good. It was too grim a day for small talk.
As they approached a turn in the corridor, Octavian spotted the police chief waiting for them by the nurses’ station outside a secure wing of the floor. Chief Kramer was in the middle of a conversation with a grave-looking doctor, a diminutive woman who seemed exhausted, but broke off the instant he saw them coming.
“Chief, this is—” Tagliatelli began.
Kramer ignored them, extending his hand. “Mr. Octavian, thanks for showing up.”
Octavian nodded. “I told you last night, Chief, that’s why we’re here. I just wish we’d been more successful last night in figuring out the source of all of this.”
“I appreciate that,” Chief Kramer said, then turned to the vampire girl. “Good morning, Charlotte.”
“Peachy,” Charlotte replied.
The chief had not been very comfortable with Charlotte in their brief meeting last night, and he seemed even less so this morning. Sometimes Octavian forgot that most of the world had still never seen a vampire outside videos on television or the Internet. She made Chief Kramer nervous, but Octavian thought that was probably for the best. The chaos around them had made everyone unpredictable, and with her hunger, Charlotte would be even more so. Octavian had caught her looking at him from time to time with a certain salacious glint in her eyes. He would have to have been blind not to see the sexual mischief there, but he wondered how much of that was really her and how much was the influence of chaos.
She would bear watching.
“Chief Kramer, this is my friend Keomany Shaw,” Octavian said. “Keomany, Don Kramer.”
The chief shook Keomany’s hand, sizing her up. Octavian had told him she was an earthwitch and could see the man trying to match his own personal image of what an elemental witch might look like to this lovely, slender creature. Keomany was half-English and half-Cambodian, and the combination of her parents’ two heritages had given her a rare beauty.
“This is Dr. O’Neil,” Chief Kramer said, indicating the pale, petite woman in her lab coat. “She’s had a hell of a night.”
They all exchanged greetings, and then Kramer turned to Octavian.
“I wanted you all here so we could compare notes, see if anyone’s learned anything that will help us get to the bottom of this. The weird shit has tapered off a little since dawn, but it hasn’t stopped, and there are new twists by the hour. In some parts of town, the plants and trees and grass have all died, but in a couple of neighborhoods it’s all grown out of control, like jungles sprouting up from nowhere. More and more people are just flipping out, turning feral. My department hasn’t been able to keep up with all the fights, and the ones they can stop, they’re not arresting anyone. Just sending them home. Sinkholes are starting to open up . . .”
Chief Kramer paused, glancing from Octavian to Keomany and back.
“I guess what I’m saying, folks, is that I hope you’ve got some good news. Tell me you can figure out the cause of all this.”
“I wish we could,” Octavian said. “We know what it is, Chief. But Keomany’s tried pinpointing the source with no luck. If we can’t find the source, maybe we’ll have better luck finding a trigger.”
Kramer nodded. “I’m not used to all of this stuff, but I had the same thought. I talked to my officers, tried figuring out a timeline. Looks like the first thing anyone noticed was all the dairy products spoiling in some parts of town.”
Octavian narrowed his eyes. The chief seemed irritated, a little on the defensive. Back in the days when Octavian had played detective, he’d seen it before, cops who bristled at the suggestion that anyone else might be able to do their jobs better than they could. Under the circumstances, Chief Kramer had mostly seemed happy for the help during the night. Octavian hoped the man was smart enough not to start getting territorial now.
“In some parts of town?” Octavian repeated.
“I take it back,” the chief said. “As far as I can tell, it happened everywhere, just not all at once. It was like a wave.”
“A wave,” Keomany said.
Octavian exchanged a glance with her.
“Where did the wave start?” Charlotte asked.
Chief Kramer gave her a surprised look, but Octavian was glad she’d asked. It showed that the vampire was focused, despite the chaos within her and the daylight without, both distracting her. It was the very question he’d been about to ask.
“It seems like it started from the coast and rolled through town east to west,” the chief said. He looked tired, dark smears under his eyes, but he perked up now. “The way the tide went out so far, like a tidal wave was coming in or something . . . do you think this started in the ocean?”
Octavian glanced at Keomany.
“It’s where we went when we first came to town,” Keomany told the chief. “I don’t think it’s the source of the magic causing this, but I definitely sensed something unnatural there.”
“It’s a start,” Chief Kramer said. “But what do we do? Send divers down? We wouldn’t know where to begin.”
“Let’s take this from another angle,” Octavian said. “Other than Charlotte over here, has anything been reported that seems occult to you? I don’t mean the effects of magic, all this chaos, but something more than that, anything your officers have run across, or anyone who seems to know more than they should—”
From the chief’s reaction, Octavian saw that he’d hit on something.
“What is it?”
“The reason we were up here to begin with,” Chief Kramer said, gesturing at Dr. O’Neil, who still stood beside him. “One of my people was murdered in the psych unit last night. Dr. O’Neil’s staff and patients took some hits as well. But one of her patients . . .”
The police chief glanced around, turned to Dr. O’Neil, and then smiled wanly.
“Maybe you’d all better hear this yourself. Could be it’ll make sense to you.”
CHAPTER 12
THE
ghost was waiting in the elevator when Miles and Amber got on. Or, at least, that was how it seemed. Over the course of his life, prompted by his first brush with the supernatural as a child, Miles had studied various occult phenomena, but all of his research and his various encounters with roaming spirits had no handle on the behavior of ghosts. All of the supposedly true stories he had ever read had provided no consensus. For all he knew, the ghost might have been following him all morning, just out of sight, and only manifested as something he could see at the moment that the elevator doors swept open and he and Amber stepped on board.
Amber didn’t seem to see the specter at all, but to Miles—whose breath and voice had caught in his throat—the ghost had an undeniable presence. Transparent, yes, but it had dimension and a certain weight, as though if he tried to touch the spirit it might feel like he was pushing his hand into water. He didn’t dare test the theory.
“Professor?” Amber said as the doors slid shut, edging closer to him to make room for the four other people in the elevator with them. “Miles? What’s wrong? Are you feeling all right?”
He couldn’t reply. His palms began to itch and he felt a trickle of sweat run down the back of his neck. Suddenly his clothes seemed too tight. He glanced around, but no one seemed to see the ghost except for him, not even Amber.
Close your eyes,
he thought.
It’ll go away.
But he wasn’t sure if that was true, and if it was, he wasn’t at all certain that he wanted the ghost to disappear. After all, he hadn’t seen Tim McConville for more than a decade. The kid had been his friend in a time when such a thing had an intensity that he’d found mostly lacking in his adult relationships. The years had flowed by him, or he by them, and Miles had grown older. But, just like his earlier encounters with the ghost, Tim McConville remained an eternal boy, a dead Peter Pan.
“Miles,” Amber ventured again, nudging him.
He tried to give her a relaxed smile, but he knew it must be hideous and pained.
“Something strange is happening,” he said quietly, trying not to draw the attention of the other people on the elevator.
“Really?” Amber said. “You’re just figuring that out?”
“Something else,” he replied.
Now they were all staring at him, listening, waiting for him to explain. But he refused to meet anyone’s gaze—not a stranger’s, not Amber’s, and not Tim McConville’s, though the ghost regarded him with imploring eyes. Instead, Miles watched the numbers above the elevator doors, cursing the age of the rattling old machine.
At last it slowed and the doors slid open. He was the first one off and he stood in the corridor while the others flowed around him. When Amber touched his arm, he flinched.