Personal Demon (13 page)

“Maybe the old-world vamps still think they can frighten the peasants with the occasional show of macabre force,” Selena said.

“Maybe the out-of-town vampire was brought in to oversee the ritual.” Just because Christopher had a brilliant smile and was an exciting lover didn’t make Ivy trust that he was one of the few good-guy vampires.

Ivy spun the scenario, because it was necessary to consider, but she hated every word she spoke, every bad thought of Christopher’s performing black rites using good people as victims. She could say it, be as hard-assed as she needed to be about him, but deep down, she couldn’t really believe it. She supposed this unwillingness had something to do with their having great sex, that they had interesting conversations, that he’d picked up her spilled books, that he’d put her in his coat when she was cold. But it was selfish to be sentimental when people were getting killed.

“Who did he perform the Change rites for?” Selena questioned.

“A strig’s companion?” Ivy ventured. “Strigs are on their own without the protection or resources of a nest. Maybe a strig asked him for help turning someone. Maybe he’s a roaming vampire for hire.” Ivy shrugged her bruised shoulders. “Ow. I don’t know.”

Selena shook her head. “Strigs generally drop off
jacked-up companions at nests for help,” Selena said. “A strig can’t take care of a baby vampire, and they don’t like to lose one of their own, no matter who the parent is. Never mind the Law of the Blood that says strigs are dead to the undead and so are their get. The loner vampires usually have friends and connections inside the nests.”

What Ivy knew of the Laws of the Blood that governed the lives of vampires didn’t make much sense. The Laws seemed so out-of-date as to be dangerous to the survival of vampirekind. She supposed you had to be on the inside of a culture to really understand what held it together.

“So, if a baby vampire ends up left on a local nest’s doorstep, we’ll know that—”

“Aunt Cate thinks the killer is a demon,” Selena said. She eyed Ivy critically. “I’m told Aunt Cate performed a binding-and-bringing ritual recently. One that put you in the center of all this crap.” She put her hands on her rounded hips. Selena was six feet tall and built like a Valkyrie. “The center of a murder investigation is not where you belong, Lilith Ivy McCoy Bailey. You aren’t trained for it.”

“No, but I was bred for it,” Ivy answered. “I’m tougher than I look,” she added.

“No, you’re not.”

So far, Ivy’s contribution to Selena’s crusade to civilize and normalize vampire and mortal relations had been to monitor vampires on the make for human partners. Not that the terms
human
and
partner
went together in vampires’ minds naturally. To vampires, who liked to forget they’d been human once themselves, humans were the servant class. Most of the victims of a vampire’s thirsts were only psychic enough to be slaves. If you were strong enough mentally to be picked as a companion someday, the exchange of blood with your vampire master led you into a form of madness. The insane craving could only be helped by your
becoming a vampire, and you had to kill and consume a mortal to change—you couldn’t help yourself. Then you turned into an arrogant snob who got to take slaves and companions for yourself. Hell of a way to run a species, was Ivy’s opinion.

Nobody was given a choice. That was one of the Laws of the Blood: that companions were property, to be used as their vampire owner pleased.

Except, that wasn’t how it worked in Chicago anymore.

Ivy’s job was to follow and report on vampires trolling for prospective brides and grooms of Dracula and make sure they were obeying the new rules. Selena and Ariel took over from there if they weren’t.

Selena broke into Ivy’s thoughts. “You’re being stalked yourself. You should have called me about the break-in.”

“I was occupied.”

Selena glanced at the bed.

Ivy shook her head. “Oh, no. It’s been a lot more than that.” She filled in her cousin on everything since Christopher grabbed her in the rain. Everything but the weird mixing of their dream selves. Some things just weren’t anybody else’s business.

When Ivy was done, Selena’s response was, “Pack a few things, I’m getting you out of here.”

“The vampire can find me again if he wants to.”

“It’s not the vampire I’m worried about. At least he’s not on the top of my list. I think Aunt Cate might qualify for number one, but your stalker is the immediate problem. I’m not letting you be the next victim.”

Ivy gritted her teeth to avoid fighting an argument she couldn’t win.

“There’s more than one killer,” Selena added when the protests she’d expected didn’t come from Ivy. “I know this from my day job. More than one killer is what the forensics
and profiling people are telling us. But they also think the killings in DeKalb are related to two bodies found here in the city with the same sort of ritual display.”

“More than one—?” A horrific notion shot painfully into Ivy’s mind. “You mean there’s a coven of serial killers out there?”

“I don’t mean anything of the sort!”

Selena’s quick vehemence told Ivy that her homicide-detective cousin certainly was considering the possibility.

“A demon-worshipping coven?” Ivy speculated. “Or crazy Satan worshippers who haven’t a clue what they’re playing with. Either way, they’re committing ritual murders to gather psychic power. Aunt Cate’s right.”

Selena was anything but convinced by her logic. “Satanists don’t know squat about what they’re doing.”

“Yeah. But if some coven has found a real spell they’re fooling around with—”

“If they manage to conjure up a demon, it will eat them, and we don’t have to worry about a trial,” Selena said. “But Aunt Cate needs to keep out of it. You need to keep out of it. Our folk aren’t the only ones being targeted.”

“We aren’t the only ones with psychic gifts,” Ivy reminded Selena. “Psychics might be the tiniest minority population on the planet, but we aren’t all related. We don’t know how many people have telepathy or see the future or are synesthetes?”

Why had she added synesthesia as a psychic gift when it was a proven neurological disorder? Christopher was unique. Couldn’t get much more unique than a vampire who heard in purple or had sex in green, or whatever all his cross-wired senses told him about sensing the world.

“The magic-using community doesn’t make the effort to find others of our kind, granted,” Selena said. “The tradition’s always been to let them find us, for pilgrims to seek
out the way and all that crap. It’s vampires that actively hunt psychics, but not to kill them.”

In a way, that was reassuring. Except, maybe Christopher needed to ritually sacrifice psychic people to keep his neurological disorder under control.

“Euww.” What a terrible suspicion. “Never mind,” she said to Selena’s curious look.

Ivy hated thinking that way about Christopher even though she knew she had to consider every possibility. She gingerly touched her bruised shoulders, reminded herself, “Vampires are not our friends.”

“Get dressed,” Selena said. “And packed. We can talk in the car.”

H
ow long are we going to wait?” Ted asked.

“You didn’t have to come with me,” Jack answered.

He didn’t want Ted there. Ted was a rapist who’d insist on having his way with the woman Jack wanted to sacrifice. He couldn’t even argue about it. The Master wanted terror, humiliation, pain. The demon lord needed strong emotions for his magic; it was their duty to bring him these gifts.

They’d been waiting in the shadows in front of the victim’s apartment building for a long time. Ted was getting cold and restless. He didn’t really have a stalker’s mentality. With him it was about charming the victim, face-to-face, or just grabbing her and pulling her into his car. Ted was about whatever was easiest, as long as he got to rape and kill.

“That woman’s still inside with her,” Ted said. “I say we take both of them.”

Ted didn’t recognize who
that
woman was, but Jack knew. He’d gotten a glimpse of her curly red hair when the
tall woman got out of her car. The Master had described her; she was a major player in the city’s psychic underground. Jack’s host knew about her, but Jack didn’t dare try to access those memories. He knew the Master would want to take care of this dangerous woman himself.

“No,” was all he said to Ted.

Ted swore. He stomped up the block and back again, hands thrust deep into his pockets. Fingering his filleting knife, no doubt. He leaned over the sidewalk and grinned vainly at his reflection in an ice-rimmed oily puddle.

He was in a better mood when he got back, all smarmy smile. “Tell me more about vampires. You said the guy who left her place was a vamp. How could you tell?”

Whoever Ted had been before his rebirth, his host’s brain certainly hadn’t been gifted with much psychic ability. While Ted’s inferiority pleased Jack, he also found it inconvenient.

“There’s an aura around vampires, an extra energy. I can’t explain it. You have to learn to look for it.”

“Show me the next time we see one, okay?”

Jack didn’t like Ted’s eagerness about vampires. To Jack, it seemed almost like treachery toward their demon Master. “Why don’t you ask about demons? There’s nothing special about vampires. They’re just changed humans. They’re made. Demons are born in a dimension beyond our comprehension. They visit our realm to gain power, gather worshippers.” And, sometimes, if a worshipper was obedient and worthy enough, demon spirit would be passed into that human. Jack would be worthy of such difficult magical transformation, he had been promised. But he wasn’t about to let Ted in on the secret between himself and the Master. He admonished Ted, “Demons are naturally superior creatures, to be served.”

Ted laughed, but said seriously enough. “Born versus
made. Yeah, I’ll keep the difference in mind. How long are we waiting?”

“You don’t have to stay.”

“You could come back in the daylight to kill the bitch,” Ted said. “We don’t have to hunt at night. Vampires do, right? They’re creatures of the night? They’re night hunters full of bloodlust?” Ted’s emphasis was on
lust
.

“Vampires sleep during the day,” Jack conceded.

“But we’re good to go twenty-four/seven.”

While that was true, daylight hunting didn’t seem right to Jack. Dark work was for the dark of night. He was probably being old-fashioned that way. Just as he was out of touch with this modern world in so many ways—look at how many the others had killed during their careers in this modern time. And they’d only done it for their own pleasure! Distasteful.

“You’re right, Ted,” he conceded. “Let’s go. This woman isn’t the only prey for me in this whole huge city.”

“Dick and John were planning to party in Lincoln Park. Maybe we can join them and make a competition out of it. Highest body count wins.”

Jack liked the notion. He’d once set the city of London shaking with terror. He’d love to have a city quaking at his feet again. The Master would drink in the energy of collective fear as well.

He smiled, almost liking Ted for this suggestion. “Win-win situation,” he said. “Yes. Let’s go.”

He glanced once more at his prey’s apartment window before walking away. “Until tomorrow, my dear.”

C
hristopher didn’t really know the Enforcer of the City of Chicago although they were brothers, of a sort, and had met once or twice. Like Christopher, Ariel, which was certainly not the name he’d been born with, was also the blood child of the Legacy—which was not the only vampire in England’s name, either. Christopher Bell didn’t understand the affectation so many vampires practiced of adopting fancy monikers.

Maybe he still felt comfortable with his own name because he was only a little over one hundred years into his vampire life. The Legacy—Christopher had called her Maggie when he’d been her companion—had been mortal when Rome ruled Britain. Ariel was her child from the sixteenth century.

Ariel—or whoever he’d been before adopting his fancy moniker—moved to America before World War I, and America was where Ariel had been reborn from normal
strigoi into the superior type of vampire known as Enforcer in this era. There’d always been powerful vampires who policed the rest of their kind, but
Enforcer
was an American term.
Nighthawk
was the traditional title.
Enforcer
was coined in Chicago, wasn’t it? Maybe Ariel had been the first to adopt the title in Chicago in the Roaring Twenties.

Christopher made a note to ask his brother in blood about it. He had a few more questions for Ariel, as well. If he ever found him, that is.

Oh, he’d located Ariel’s residence during his dream-walking expedition the day before. He’d been able to tell that Ariel wasn’t resting there. He didn’t expect Ariel to be home this evening, either. It wasn’t an Enforcer’s job to sit around the house watching sports on the telly in the evening. Vampires lived at night, and that was when Enforcers worked their pitch—enforcing.

Just what Ariel was enforcing these days was one of the other things Christopher wanted to ask him about. Protecting vampires from mortals was one of the Enforcer’s jobs. Was Ariel doing that? If so, why was this Selena person, and even perky, pretty Ivy still alive? Fodder for Ariel’s personal harem, perhaps, on a leash and used for his own reasons? Christopher hoped it was something as complicated as that. It would be bad for Ariel if the Enforcer of the City proved to have become lax in his duties. Brother in blood or not.

Ariel made his home on the north side of the city, in one of a discreet row of expensive renovated three-story brick town houses.

“Very nice,” Christopher murmured after circling the block to examine the outside of the building from front and back.

He’d discovered that no one was inside, not a scent of mortal or strigoi blood lingered. If Ariel had a companion,
she or he didn’t live with the Enforcer, but that was frequently the case. There were no slaves lurking indoors. Enforcers rarely had nest mates, either. Hard to be part of a familial group when you might have to eat them someday if they were naughty.