Claimed by the Immortal (The Claiming) (11 page)

“He mentioned it. I just hadn’t extrapolated.”

“Trust me, it extrapolates to showers, as well. I used to find every excuse to go home to shower, and it wasn’t easy in the middle of a fast-moving case.”

The blackout curtain proved to need only one more tack, largely because it was so much bigger than the window that it did a really good job.

Now it was night inside even though it was broad daylight outside.

Chloe brought out some bagels she had purchased on her way in along with some smoked salmon and cream cheese. Caro realized she was famished and helped herself liberally. “What kinds of wards does Jude use?” she asked.

“The kind he grew up with—holy water and sanctified oils. Sometimes he has me put up my own wards.”

“Which kind are yours?”

“I’m sort of Wiccan, but since I started working with Jude I’ve learned a whole lot about all kinds of other beliefs.” Chloe made an impish face. “You could say I’ve developed my own methods.”

“I admit I don’t know much about it,” Caro remarked as she ate. “My grandmother called herself a witch, but Damien says she was more of a mage.”

“Really?” Interest was written over Chloe’s face. “I think he meant that your grandmother may have had very strong powers?”

“Evidently. I’ll be honest, Chloe. I’m pretty much at sea with all of this.” In fact, she seemed to be sailing farther from the shores of reality with every passing hour. “I didn’t really pay attention to Grandma because I didn’t believe in much that I couldn’t see.”

“I imagine that’s been busy changing.”

“Obviously.”

Chloe forked another sliver of salmon onto her bagel. “Well, Wicca is what Jude insists on calling an emergent religion. By that he means we don’t have one single act together, and I guess he’s right about that. We disagree on a lot of things and agree on a lot of others, and we all call ourselves Wiccan.”

“So how do you decide?”

Chloe shrugged. “I take what suits me and make the rest myself, basically.”

A few minutes later, she paused as she ate and looked directly at Caro. “What do
you
believe?”

“Right now I’m undergoing a radical transformation.” A truth that didn’t sound nearly as bad as it sometimes felt.

* * *

They worked all day, exploring the detailed backgrounds of all the murder victims. At this point, Caro was ready to bend some rules, and she accessed case-file interviews with everyone who knew the family. Chloe even taught her a few things, such as how to hack into social networks to see things that only the account holder was supposed to see.

She was so absorbed in finding information and making notes that she was startled when Jude and Damien emerged, signaling the end of daylight. There had been no cues, of course, with the office sealed up against light, but it was still hard to believe so many hours had passed.

Damien scanned her. “You look much more awake.”

“No kidding,” Chloe responded. “I was banging around in here for nearly an hour before she opened her eyes.”

Ignoring the others, Damien came to squat beside Caro where she sat at the spare computer, which Chloe had placed on a table for her. “How do you feel?” He continued to appraise her, his eyes filled with concern.

“This morning I felt hungover, but I’m fine now. For a while I dreamed a darkness was squeezing my chest and sucking all the air out of me. It was so hard to wake. I’d like to know what happened.”

“So would I.” He reached out to touch her hair and cheek with such gentleness that her heart squeezed.

She had not expected him to be gentle. Nor did she want her heart responding to him in any way. Despite her reluctance, however, she couldn’t bring herself to pull away from his touch. She needed it, needed it so she wouldn’t feel quite so alone while she faced this evil killer she couldn’t even see. Needed it because her heart ached for it. Needed it because she had suffered so many shocks in such a short time that a kind touch could feel like a lifeline.

“I’m not sure you should leave this office until we learn more.”

Nothing was better guaranteed to raise her determination. “I am
not
about to become the prisoner of fear!”

He smiled and stood. “There’s my Caro,” he remarked. “Nonetheless.” He looked at Jude.

“I agree, at least for now. We need to feed the ladies. Chloe, why don’t you join me? Let’s go out and get some real food. Terri will be joining us soon, and she doesn’t have to go to work for a few hours yet.”

Chloe jumped up. “Real food? As long as I don’t have to cook it. But I don’t want anything we can have delivered. I want something different. Caro?”

Caro shook her head. “Anything is fine. I’m not picky.”

Terri’s voice drew her attention to the doorway of Jude’s inner office. She was dressed for work already, to judge by her neat slacks suit, and was smiling. “I already put in my vote for seafood. Are you allergic, Caro?”

“Not at all.”

“Then the three of us will be back shortly with loads of shrimp, lobster and crab.”

Caro watched the women pull on their winter coats and leave with Jude before she said to Damien, “We were obviously excluded from that outing. Or I was.”

“I don’t mind,” Damien said. “Do you?”

Before she could answer, he reached for her hand and drew her to her feet until she stood only inches from him.

Once again he raised a hand to caress her hair and cheek lightly with his palm.

“When I resurrected tonight, the first thing on my mind was you. How do you do that to me, Caro?”

She wished she knew the answer, because he affected her the same way. Throughout the day her thoughts had turned to him, and when she had taken a nap under Chloe’s watchful eye so that she could stay awake longer tonight, he had been waiting for her behind her eyelids and in her dreams.

Hot, sizzling dreams, the kinds of things the mind could only spin in unguarded moments. One in particular made her almost want to blush, and she might have if not for the fact that no one but she knew what it was.

She had dreamed that she stood before him in a dimly lit room, while he used that voice that made others obey him but that only made her tingle.

But in the dream it had made her obey him as it could not in the waking world. He had simply smiled and said, “Strip for me.”

And she had. She could remember every aching moment of it as desire, anticipation and nervousness had filled her. What if he didn’t like the way she looked? What if he never touched her at all?

Never in real life had she done that for a man, and it almost shocked her that she could have such a wish, even in her dreams, to display herself that way.

In the dream, she had stood naked before him, following commands to turn, bend over, part her legs, until she had felt so incredibly exposed, knowing he was looking at her sex while she couldn’t see him at all.

At the order to spread herself more, she had obeyed, experiencing an even more agonizing need to be touched and reassured that he desired her.

In the dream she had felt so deliciously helpless and enthralled, so free and yet so oddly inhibited.

The only thing she wanted was for him to do whatever he wished with her.

Finally, finally, she had felt the soft touch of his fingers on her exposed petals, stroking, separating, exploring...

And just as she thought she would explode, the dream had vanished.

Standing before him now, she was very glad he couldn’t read her mind.

But he could read her scents, and as she peeked up at him, she saw knowledge in his gaze. At least it wasn’t arrogant knowledge, or even self-satisfied knowledge. He seemed perplexed, actually.

“Somehow,” he murmured, “we are going to have to find time to settle this matter between us. Safely. For both of us.”

At least he was frank. She appreciated that. Most of her experience with dating had been of the kind that involved dancing around, a lot of pretense and even some outright lies. In fact, she had reached a point where she believed the words
I love you
were one of the biggest lies in the English language.

At least he was calling this what it was: raw desire. She was also somewhat reassured by his description of claiming. It meant he potentially had as much to lose as she did.

She felt breathless, though, as he lowered his head and nestled his mouth against hers. Cool lips, soft lips. Not cold. Nothing about him was as cold as she would have expected.

Then he drew back, trailing his hand over her throat and breast before quite suddenly reappearing across the room. “But not now.”

Definitely not now. Not with Jude, Terri and Chloe likely to walk in at any moment with dinner.

“Soon,” he promised. “Very soon.”

She actually hoped so. She had to get this vampire out of her head and out of her dreams. She struggled for a coherent thought, something else to talk about before she ceased to give a damn if someone walked in.

“Why was I so sleepy?”

“I don’t know and that worries me. It definitely wasn’t a natural sleep.”

“It didn’t feel like one. I felt drugged. But when I took a nap this afternoon, that was normal sleep.” Well, normal except for her dreams. “Do you think that energy was doing something to me?”

“That’s my guess.”

“But it killed the others. It hasn’t killed me.”

“Perhaps because of that gris-gris Alika gave you. Or perhaps because we got you back to Jude’s office before it could finish its work. One thing I’ve decided is that if you want to go back to your apartment we need to make sure Jude wards it thoroughly.”

“Okay, I’ll agree with that. But we’ve still got to figure out how to deal with this elemental.”

“I’m beginning to think the only way to deal with it is to find the person who summoned it.”

That didn’t cheer Caro at all. Millions of people in this city. Thousands who could be dabbling with occult powers. Finding the one responsible for this sounded a whole lot harder than finding a human murderer. “You know, when the police hunt for a killer, we usually have a clue or two. Some indication of a troubled relationship. Fingerprints, other physical evidence. There’s no evidence in this case.”

“You were the one who cautioned us not to narrow ourselves too much. A wise caution. But it remains that elementals don’t kill people for their own reasons. They kill because people set them the task by creating a curse that calls them. So we still have the clue of motive to guide us.”

“And any one of thousands of people who might have done this. Unless we find
the
motive.”

“You found nothing today that stood out?”

“With all Chloe and I did, we came to the realization that this guy was a developer and landlord with his fingers in so many pots around the city that we might be able to narrow our suspect list to a few thousand rather than tens of thousands.”

“Great.” He sounded as unhappy as she felt.

The others returned with steamed crab legs, boiled shrimp and some lobster tails. The women gathered around a folding table to eat while the two vampires sat farther away.

“So,” said Chloe, as she forked some threads of lobster from a tail and dipped them into drawn butter, “Caro and I spent our entire day trying to sort through Pritchett’s dealings. It would be only a small exaggeration to say he was involved in about fifty percent of what goes on in this city, from real estate to development to belonging to the boards of banks and other companies.”

“In short,” Caro said, “he was probably a huge target in a lot of ways. You don’t get to that level without making some enemies.”

“What about the rest of the family?” Jude asked.

“Kids had no reported problems at school,” Caro answered promptly. “The police interviewed their friends and school officials. Nobody was aware of any troubles.”

“The brother-in-law?”

“He just started working for Andrew Pritchett a couple of months ago. That’s the only association we could find other than the marriage.”

“What did he do?”

Chloe and Caro exchanged looks. “We don’t know,” Caro said finally. “We only know when he went on the payroll.”

“What did he do before that?”

Caro’s heart accelerated a little and she leaned toward Jude. “He worked for the city-planning department.”

“Ah...” The sigh seemed to emerge from both vampires at the same moment.

“It could just be a coincidence,” Caro reminded them. “He did his job okay, according to everything I could find. Pritchett might have hired him to make his wife happy.”

“Or something else could have been going on.”

“Agreed.”

Damien spoke. “We need to look much closer at that. “While I’ll be the first to allow that life has plenty of coincidences, this one seems just a bit suspicious. We need to look more closely at what Pritchett was doing over the last six months and why he might have found someone from city planning useful.”

Then he swiftly changed the subject, turning to Jude. “I want you to put wards on Caro’s place. Something got to her last night. In her home. From what she said of her dreams, it may have been trying to kill her in her sleep.”

Jude’s smile was almost wry. “I thought you were the mage.”

“I’m taking a refresher. Regardless, Caro came out of whatever was being done to her after she got here. So there’s some protection in your spells.”

“And Chloe’s,” Jude remarked. “All right. When I take Terri to work, we’ll all go and try to make Caro’s place safe.”

Chapter 7

T
hey all piled into Jude’s ramshackle car and dropped Terri at the morgue. Then Jude and Chloe warded Caro’s apartment and Jude gave her some holy water and a tiny vial of sanctified oil. “Carry them with you,” he suggested. “You never know.”

But after they’d returned Jude and Chloe to the office to do more research on Pritchett’s background, Damien and Caro took the car to go visit some more shops that catered to the adherents of alternative religions.

“I really hadn’t realized how many of these shops there are,” Caro remarked. “And I thought I knew this city, being a cop.”

“I imagine they keep a fairly low profile. Most would tend to have a small, select clientele, and they wouldn’t want problems with mainstream religionists.”

“I guess. It just seems odd I’ve never really noticed them before.”

“Why? Because of your grandmother?”

Caro glanced at him. “Maybe I didn’t notice
because
of my grandmother. Out of sight, out of mind.”

“Ah.” He let that lie, giving her space to work it through if she wanted.

It was then that she remembered another dream from her nap that afternoon, one that had nothing to do with her incredible desire to hop in the sack with a vampire.

Her grandmother. She had been sitting on her grandmother’s lap in the old rocking chair that creaked with every movement. Grandma had been telling her another of her fantastical stories—or had she?

Dreams were elusive at the best of times, and since she’d already almost forgotten she had had this one, it was a struggle to remember much more than how good she’d always felt sitting on Grandma’s lap.

How safe. How cherished. A lump rose in her throat.

You have the gift, sweet child. I feel it in you. It’s a greater gift than mine, perhaps as great as my grandmother’s.

What had that meant? Had her mind made it up? But no, something deep within her felt convinced that her grandmother had said that. A great gift?

She closed her eyes and tried to pull more of the memory or dream to mind, sensing it might be important in some way, whether her sleeping brain had manufactured it or whether it was the result of something she recalled.

Feel within yourself. It’s sleeping now, dreaming of great things, but you can wake it at any time, my darling Caro. Belief is the key.

Belief? All her life she’d refused to believe in much beyond her five senses. Yes, she had a certain psychic skill, but sometimes she even convinced herself she was just good at reading people.

Even though she never quite believed that.

“Damien?”

“Yes?”

“When you were a mage—well, I guess you still are—but back when you practiced all the time, what did belief mean to you?”

“In what way? What I believed in? What I believed about myself? How I used belief?”

She hesitated, partly because the question wasn’t really clear to her. “I think my grandmother once said that belief is the key, and I think she meant to my power.”

“That would make sense. Do you want to stop for some coffee before we go to the first shop? You look cold.”

Well, of course she was cold, she thought wryly. He was protecting himself against her scents by keeping his window rolled down again. If she had to ride in the car too often with this guy, she was going to need better winter clothes.

But coffee sounded good, as did a brief break before they met another enigmatic shopkeeper who would seem determined to tell them as little as possible.

He pulled over and parked in front of a nearly empty diner. She noticed as they walked in, however, that Damien didn’t go unnoticed. Eyes immediately looked his way, and then almost subtly, people seemed to pull back a little as if they sensed something. It amused her to see people react so unconsciously to a man who appeared perfectly normal. She wondered what they were sensing.

When he looked around for a waiter, though, a middle-aged woman came hurrying over as if commanded. Could his glance do that, too?

“Two coffees,” he said, then turned to Caro. “Do you want dessert? You didn’t eat all that much.”

The thought of something sweet with her coffee sounded very good now that he mentioned it. She grabbed the plastic menu and scanned quickly. “Cheese Danish, please.”

When the woman walked away to get their order, she leaned toward Damien, who sat across from her. “Can you drink coffee?”

“I can drink and eat. It just doesn’t please me anymore. Most things taste about like dirt.”

“Oh.” She wasn’t sure she’d want to give up the joy of eating lobster or a pastry. “Do you miss it?”

“Never. Most of what you humans enjoy so much didn’t exist in my human lifetime. I ate a lot of lamb, fish, flat breads, fruits, figs and olives. And everything was full of sand.”

She laughed. “Sand would kind of kill it for me.”

“It was part of life. I didn’t think about it then.” He was smiling, though. “So I’ve never tasted most of the culinary delights you humans so enjoy now. How could I miss them?”

“Good question. I hadn’t really thought about it.”

“When I served at temple and someone brought me a plate of figs or olives, they always poured water over it to rid it of the sand. Hopeless enterprise for the most part, but a nice gesture.”

“But I thought it was the fertile crescent, so full of plants and gardens.”

“Part of it was, although not all of it. We had swamps, too. But the winds would blow and the dust would come from elsewhere. Even today you get the Saharan dust on your East Coast at times.”

She nodded. “I’ve heard about that.”

“Usually not enough for you to notice. Being closer to the deserts, we experienced more of it.”

“You still haven’t answered my question about belief.”

Just then the waitress returned with their order. He waited until the coffee and pastry were served and they were alone again in their corner of the diner.

“Belief manifests in many ways and can be used in many ways. Often, as a priest, I played on the beliefs of our adherents. You see that often in religions even today. Your priest or minister says something and the congregation believes it as an article of faith. Things don’t have to be explained. Nothing is questioned.”

“Did you believe in what you were doing?”

“Of course. I became a priest.”

She nodded. “Okay, so you believed along with your adherents. But what else? What could my grandmother have meant?”

“Belief is indeed a key and not just to the minds of others. If you are a mage, as I am, it’s necessary to believe in your own power, Caro. You have to
believe
in your gifts to unlock them. You have to believe that you can repel a demon or cause a mountain to move. Whenever you wish to do something you can’t do by ordinary means, you have to believe you can do it by extraordinary means.”

“Belief is a difficult thing.”

“Very, if you weren’t raised to believe something. Jude’s wards are the ones he was raised to believe in—holy water and chrism, the sanctified oils. But ask yourself what empowers water that contains a bit of salt or olive oil into something that protects against evil.”

She nodded, swallowing pastry. “Belief.”

“Exactly. Jude is open-minded enough to take advantage of the wards that Chloe has learned.
She
believes in them.”

“So belief is the key to accessing power?”

“In a way. Belief is also what makes things powerful. I’m not going to say that forces don’t exist apart from belief, because they do. But to harness them, you must both believe in them and believe in your own ability to do so.”

“But I never believed in this thing that’s attached itself to me.”

“Until you saw what it did to that man.”

He had a point. She definitely believed the evidence of her own eyes and that there was a man lying on a morgue table that Terri had said couldn’t have been impaled that way by ordinary means unless he’d
fallen
on those horns. Had that helped make her aware of this force that watched her? Helped her to believe it was there? Was she making it more powerful by believing in it?

Damien spoke again. “Belief sometimes comes from experience and sometimes from learning. Sometimes it’s almost inherent. But no spell I ever worked as a mage worked if I didn’t believe it would.”

Caro ate another tidbit of pastry while she thought about that. “Did your belief grow with every experience that worked?”

“Of course it did. It’s a bit like a hump you have to get over.”

“So my grandmother was telling me something important.”

“She was telling you something
essential.
Two people can use the same spell. One merely hopes it might work. The other absolutely believes it will. Same spell, different outcomes. The person who
hopes
will probably see little result compared to the one who believes.”

Caro thought about that for a few minutes. “I’m a great believer in hope,” she said finally.

“Hope is what keeps us going. But belief, as your grandmother said, is the true key to our inherent powers.”

“Well, since I believe that thing exists, I ought to believe in my ability to send it away.”

“You should.” His smile was kind. “But the two are not necessarily interchangeable.”

* * *

Okay, she thought as they drove to the next shop, she certainly believed that force had killed at least five people and possibly a sixth. She certainly believed it had been dogging her heels since she had seen it in action.

So how great a leap should it be from believing in
it
to believing in her own power to drive it away? But she had to admit, it was a heckuva leap, right across a chasm she’d been avoiding all her life.

Rage had probably been the motivating factor in summoning the elemental, if that’s what it was. So how about she start with a little rage of her own in place of the fear and uneasiness she’d been feeling? Hadn’t her grandmother said something about fear feeding other powers?

It was one of the reasons, she was sure, that she’d grown up to be relatively fearless. Heck, she wouldn’t be able to do her job as a cop if she were constantly afraid of what might happen, and while a little fear could be a good thing in a bad situation—self-preservational, even—she wasn’t sure it was always the most useful response.

It didn’t seem like a useful one now. She wasn’t yet scared enough to reach the flight-or-fight response of adrenaline, which in past dangerous situations had made it possible for her to confront her fears. What was different this time?

The fact that she couldn’t see the threat? No guns were being fired? Or maybe the lingering belief somewhere deep inside that something intangible couldn’t really hurt her.

Maybe that was the hardest bit of all to swallow. Maybe she needed to swallow it, and quickly.

Something had certainly put her into an unnatural sleep early this morning, haunted her dreams, fed on her fears. So it could affect her. Maybe the only reason it hadn’t killed her was that Damien had gotten her to Jude’s, where the spell or effect had worn off.

Or maybe it had something to do with the inherent power her grandmother had always claimed she had.

“Damien?”

“Yes?”

“If I have power, can you teach me how to use it?”

“I can help you start,” he said slowly. “But how far into this world do you want to go?”

“I think I’m already into it up to my neck.”

“That’s debatable. Other people can fight it for you.”

“No. I’ve got to play a part in this. I have to be able to live with myself, you know.”

He didn’t say any more until they were parked in front of the Candlelight New Age Shoppe. “All right,” he said. “We’ll start small because I’m rusty and need to practice, and because if we try anything really big, you’re apt to grow doubts rather than belief.”

“Fair enough.”

As they stepped into the shop, Caro was struck by how different it was from the previous two. This owner believed in light and cleanliness and space. It might have been a large, traditional bookstore except for the heavy scent of incense and the candles burning in sconces. The crammed rows of jars behind the counter made the shop look like an old-fashioned apothecary.

The lady who greeted them apparently didn’t feel her job called for any theatrics. She looked like a middle-aged businesswoman in a hot-pink suit that flattered her coloring. Her graying hair was so perfectly coiffed that Caro almost reached up to pat her own dark hair into place.

The woman’s smile was warm and inviting. “Can I help you with something? I’m Jenny Besom, the proprietor.”

Caro immediately reached out to shake hands. Damien, she noticed, hung back a little, and that was so unlike him Caro felt her alert level rise just a bit.

“We’re doing some research,” Caro said when Damien didn’t launch into the matter. “We’re curious about elementals.”

“Elementals?” Jenny sounded surprised. “I don’t get many people asking about that.” She gave a little laugh. “Most want to know how to cast a circle or how to invoke a healing. Or, of course, whether there’s such a thing as a love potion.”

Caro smiled, glancing at Damien, wondering what had made him stay in the background. Damien was never in
anyone’s
background. “No, not in the market for spells—just some understanding.”

Jenny looked past her at Damien and seemed to do a double take. Her smile faded a bit. Caro immediately wondered if Jenny was seeing his aura or sensing something else. In the diner she had certainly seen people’s body language express some uneasiness as Damien passed.

Then Damien spoke, and Caro heard that tone again, the one that evoked obedience. What in the world had set him off?

“Elementals,” Damien said. “Do you have any personal experience of them?”

“No.” The smile had faded from Jenny’s face.

“What powers do you use?”

“I invoke powers to heal and help.”

“And nothing else?”

“No, never.”

“But help can be interpreted in various ways, can’t it?”

Jenny nodded.

“I thought so. Have you sensed something going on in this town?”