Kitty Rocks the House (8 page)

This call came from Cormac. Maybe he had some good news. I answered, “Yeah?”

“I think I found where your vampire priest is holed up.”

“You did? Where?” If we found Columban, I’d bet we’d find Rick.

“You want to go see?”

“We’re not going to be sneaking up on this guy, are we?”

“It’s the middle of the day, what can he do? I’ll pick you up.”

Twenty minutes later his Jeep was at the curb in front of KNOB. Bag and jacket in hand, I piled into the passenger seat. He drove off without a word.

We’d gone six or seven blocks before I couldn’t stand the silence anymore. “So what’d you find?” I asked.

He wore a thin, wry smile. “You gotta ask yourself, if you were a priest, and a vampire, where would you go?”

“I’m not really in the mood for this,” I said.

“It’s pretty funny.”

“Come on? Where?”

He was enjoying himself too much to give the surprise away. I crossed my arms and slouched.

We crossed the freeway into downtown, and he turned from Colfax onto the Auraria campus, a collection of university buildings on a surprisingly pastoral campus for being the middle of downtown Denver. He made a couple of turns into a warren of buildings and parked in a circular drive beside a large, pink church. It had two square, neo-Spanish colonial towers in front; a curved, graceful roofline; gray trim. It must have been almost a century old, and the rest of the city had clearly grown up around it.

“Here it is.”

I pointed at the crosses at the top of the building. “It’s a church.”

“Yup.”

“I thought vampires couldn’t go into churches,” I said. “Consecrated ground and all that.”

“But this one’s not a church anymore. The parish moved out in the seventies, and it’s been used as an auditorium ever since. There’s a dinosaur museum in the basement.”

So, where do you go to find a vampire priest? A deconsecrated church. Of course. I chuckled. “Well, that’s cute.”

He opened the door and climbed out.

“Wait, what are you doing?” I called, scrambling out of my side of the Jeep. “You can’t go staking him or anything. Rick’ll kill us.”

He glanced at me sidelong, and I growled under my breath.

“I’m only guessing he’s here,” he said. “A vampire isn’t going to leave a trail or reveal himself unless he wants to. Nothing’s better at hiding than they are. But you’ve seen it before—don’t look for the vampire, look for what he’s using to protect himself. I made a list of likely places and started visiting them, and I found something.”

We walked around to the back of the building, to a quiet space by a house connected to the church—the former rectory. A row of shrubs and a flower garden, daffodils nodding and lilacs filling the air with a heady smell, sheltered the space from the foot traffic on the sidewalk.

Cormac knelt on the ground, and I knelt with him, watching. He pulled items out of his pockets and arranged them on the lawn in front of him, which meant he was going to work a spell. Or, Amelia was. Because of her, I never knew what Cormac was going to draw from his figurative hat next. His pockets always had arcane bits and pieces in them.

He picked up a stub of a red candle, the wick already blackened; a sprig of some herb; and a piece of black twine. He wrapped the herb to the candle with the twine, then lit the candle using a cheap lighter, which seemed wrong somehow. A real wizard ought to be able to spark it out of thin air, right? But I’d hung around with enough magicians over the last few years to know the answer to that: you don’t waste magic on something you can do without it. The cheap lighter ignited the candle’s wick just fine.

Cormac’s lips moved, mouthing words. He stepped forward, toward the church wall, holding the candle in front of him, its flame wavering with the movement. About twenty steps away, the yellow drop of fire went out. The air was still, but a stray breeze might have extinguished it. I looked around, as if expecting to find that some invisible person nearby had blown it out.

He backed up, and the candle flared to life again. He walked a little ways farther down, following the line of an invisible circle, moved toward the building—and again the flame died. He tried it two or three more times, and each time he crossed that invisible threshold, the candle went out, or relit.

“That’s really weird,” I said, unnecessarily.

“Yeah, Amelia saw markings, there and there.” He pointed to black squiggly marks, one on a corner of the church, another on a nearby tree, and a third on the back of a
NO PARKING
sign near the street. I’d have figured they were random graffiti tags, if I noticed them at all. But now that he’d pointed them out, they had a pattern—pairs of stylized letters, medieval alchemical or zodiac signs maybe.

I tried to visualize what the candle told us was there in spirit. “Someone cast a protective circle here,” I said. “Protecting against what?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Cormac said. “May be nothing. May be a habit of his.”

“You’re sure it’s Rick’s vampire friend that did it?”

“Because we don’t know any other vampires who are magicians, right?”

My shoulders unconsciously bunched up, an imitation of hackles rising. He was talking about Roman, who’d spent part of his two thousand years as a vampire learning how to work magic. Guy could do it all.

“Are you saying Columban is with Roman?”

“I’m just saying that vampires and magic aren’t mutually exclusive. And that this guy knows how to cover his ass and doesn’t seem to need any help doing it. The symbols are European, medieval—it’s what I’d expect from a vampire working for the Vatican.”

“So he’s a vampire Catholic priest
and
a magician. I’d have assumed those would all be mutually exclusive.”

“I don’t think we can make any assumptions. Guy’ll do what he needs to do.”

Didn’t really make the situation any
better.

Cormac continued, “This is just a defense against a supernatural threat. Won’t stop someone with a stake, if it comes to that.”

“He may have mundane servants for that,” I said. “So no, we’re not staking him. This is Rick’s problem.” For now. I really had to let him know about Hardin’s police sketch.

“We know where he’s most likely staying, now. We can keep an eye on him.”

That would have to be enough. I looked over the building. It probably had a basement or cellar, or at the very least a windowless utility closet, locked and protected. People moved around here all day, never knowing about the vampires lurking here.

We returned to the Jeep. I mulled possibilities. Not knowing what to expect next made planning ahead difficult. Was Columban worried about something specific? Did I need to be worried about it, too? Or was this a general precaution? I asked, “Would a protective circle like that work if the church were still consecrated? Still a church, I mean?”

“If it were still a church you wouldn’t need the circle. But then, the vampire wouldn’t be there.”

Maybe that was why Columban did it, and for no other reason. He couldn’t use a real church, but he could make a facsimile of one.

Cormac asked, “If Rick decides to go with this guy and leave Denver, what are you going to do?”

I couldn’t imagine such a thing. Rick leaving Denver—Rick
was
Denver. He’d been around since before there was a Denver. He couldn’t leave Denver. I almost blurted the words, unthinking. But Columban represented something Rick thought he lost centuries ago. I remembered the way he looked that night, as if the universe had rearranged itself around him.

“Try to talk him out of it?” I said. I honestly didn’t know what I’d do if Rick left. Try to be happy for him.

I had a bigger question. We were supposed to be working to oppose Roman together. The only way this whole opposition thing worked is if Rick and I were in it together. If Rick left to become some kind of vampire priest, I’d be on my own. Would vampires like Nasser even listen to me, then?

“You should know,” I said. “Hardin’s looking for this guy, too.”

“I’m not telling her about this,” Cormac said, with the contempt he held for all cops.

“That’s what I thought. I need to hold her off until I can get ahold of Rick.”

“She won’t hear it from me.”

Cormac drove me back to work, waiting until we were in the parking lot at KNOB to ask, “Heard there’s a new werewolf in town.”

I looked at him, startled. “How do you know about him?”

“Keep my eyes open, that’s all.”

Cormac hadn’t been at New Moon last night, I was sure of it. Had Ben told him? “Are you
spying
on us? On New Moon?”

“Like I said, just keeping my eyes open. So, how’s that going?”

I slouched in the seat and growled. “It’s fine, everything’s fine,” I said, noncommittal. He gave me a sidelong look.

“When’s full moon, Saturday? He going with you?”

“What, you thinking of tagging along, just in case?”

“I could.”

I glared at him. “And how exactly would you accomplish that? You think you’re going to dig some of your silver bullets out of storage and sit on a hillside playing sniper?” That was exactly the kind of thing he’d have done in the old days, before his time in prison. Now, as an ex-con, handling firearms could get him thrown back into prison. Ben and I seemed to treat the threat more seriously than he did. Or he was purposefully pulling our chains. I would never know. “No. We’ll be fine.”

“You change your mind, call.”

“We can handle it. This is normal pack stuff. Everything’s fine.”

“You keep saying that.”

He was worried. This was his way of saying he was worried. So I didn’t snap back at him. This time, instead of saying everything would be just fine, nothing to worry about, I said, “If we need you, we’ll call.” Which was all anybody wanted to hear from family in the end, wasn’t it?

*   *   *

“G
OOD EVENING,
this is Kitty Norville and in case you didn’t know, you’re listening to
The Midnight Hour
. Cutting edge, controversial, and all that good stuff. I know what you tune in for, and I’m here to make sure you leave happy. Tonight I’ve got a couple of guests on the show, calling in from their respective offices to discuss with me a brand-new book making the rounds:
In the Blood,
a memoir by a guy named Edward Alleyn. That’s Edward Alleyn, vampire, in what might be the first widely published vampire memoir ever. I should also mention that the author claims to be Edward Alleyn, the Elizabethan actor who starred in the great plays of Christopher Marlowe, which means he’s been alive for some four hundred years, and he wants to tell us all about it. The book is stirring up a lot of heated discussion in some quarters. It’s been called a window into the Elizabethan age, as well as the century’s lamest hoax. What do you think? Have you read the book, and was it really written by a four-hundred-year-old vampire celebrity, or is it some ghost writer’s shameless bid for publicity? I’ve found a historian and a literary scholar who’ve both read the book and have come to different conclusions about the author’s claims. For all our edifications, I’ve brought them here to discuss.”

Now, I knew very well that the book really was by Edward Alleyn, vampire, who really was the Elizabethan actor. These days, he was Master of London, and I’d stayed with him last year when I traveled to the city for the First International Conference on Paranatural Studies. I was the one who talked him into writing the thing, and I read an advance copy to give him a nice glowing review. Not that he needed it. He’d sparked enough publicity all on his own to hit the bestseller list in the first week of release. This was without doing any kind of promotion, public appearances, interviews, or anything. That was his condition for doing the book—that he could remain in the shadows, out of the public eye, as he’d done since his “death” in 1626. Plenty of controversy could be generated without his direct participation, though, and I had a feeling he was enjoying the show from the safety of one of his sumptuous manor houses.

“Professor Sean Eret is a historian from the University of Michigan, and he’ll start us off. Welcome to the show, Dr. Eret.” Eret had written articles defending the book, and I was looking forward to hearing from him.

“Thank you for inviting me. This should prove energizing.”

“Lay it out for me: you believe the author of
In the Blood
is telling the truth and really is the actor Edward Alleyn turned vampire.”

He had a pleasant, rumbly professor voice. Like he ought to be sitting in a big comfy chair by an old-fashioned fireplace. I chose to imagine him so. “It’s not outside the realm of reason that this book is a work of fiction. But if it is, a ridiculous amount of historical research went into its creation. Alleyn has details here that most historians have never even thought to research. The names of Queen Elizabeth’s hounds and falcons, for example. He’s right, by the way, and I had to call in favors at the British Library to check. It’s astonishing.”

“So the historical accuracy was enough to convince you?” I said.

“It’s impressive all on its own, but there’s so much more to the book than that. It’s the
personality
of it.”

“You want to explain what you mean by that?”

“Facts, historical detail, no matter how obscure, can be researched. But the author of this book has managed to take on the mind-set of a person living in that time and place. The chapters dealing with his early life—they’re exquisite. It’s difficult for a modern author, no matter how diligent, to replicate the historical mind without some kind of judgment or commentary on that time as history. Alleyn is so comfortable with the biases and prejudices of a man from that time and place, I’m very much inclined to believe his claims.”

“The gossip about Shakespeare and Marlowe doesn’t hurt, either,” I said.

“If the anti-Stratfordians won’t take the word of Edward Alleyn that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s plays, I’m not sure there’s any hope for them.”

“I think I have to agree with you, sir,” I said. “This sounds like a fine time to bring on my second guest, to offer a counterpoint. Professor Amanda McAdams, who teaches literature at the University of California at Santa Barbara and has written extensively on Elizabethan drama, thank you for joining us.”