Personal Demon (2 page)

Christopher discovered what was wrong the moment he
stepped off the train at the busy station. Newsboys rushed up and down the platform, brandishing papers at the crowd of new arrivals. He smelled ink that wasn’t yet dry.

The boys shouted, “New letter from the Ripper!”

“Read what the coppers aren’t telling us!”

“Women afraid to leave their homes!”

Christopher read a headline of the paper a boy pushed under his nose, the words “Where will the Ripper strike next?” were scrawled across the top of the page in huge, bold black letters.

Oh, yes, he remembered hearing about this now from his secretary, Mr. Morse, who loved gossip. How could the lurid scandal have slipped his mind? There was someone killing prostitutes in Whitechapel. He’d wondered at hearing this talked about in a Portsmouth pub. Prostitutes were killed, a sad fact of the sort of life folk were forced to live in the slums. It seemed this commonplace had taken the fancy of the whole country. And London proper was boiling over with fear about it. Not outrage, not exactly. He would have welcomed the boil of indignation seething through the good citizens; it would have been a clean emotional smell in his mind. But the stink was one of unnecessary terror and sick titillation. The fear was for the good women of the city, which made no logical sense. Good women didn’t roam the narrow, filthy streets of Whitechapel. Good women didn’t go with strangers, knowing that each customer might be a killer but needing the coin anyway. People should be outraged; instead, they were merely afraid. But afraid enough to give him a nervous reaction that was growing into one of his horrible headaches.

Outrage might have speared good people along to make an effort to clean up the slums, find employment for unfortunates like this Ripper’s victims. But righteous outrage wasn’t what these newsboys were hawking. Outrage would
only sell papers to the reformers, and that wouldn’t bring in enough coins to make a decent profit for the publishers.

Christopher Bell wished he were still at sea.

Instead, he found himself a hansom cab and rode off to take a room at his father’s London club. It was on a quiet street in a respectable neighborhood. He drank a whiskey, and another, and tried to go to bed. But the pain screamed at him, in him. It called to him, from inside and outside his brain. He needed to do something. That’s what the pain insisted. He needed to move, to walk. To hunt.

It was a foolish, frightening notion, but he found himself out on the dark street on a cold November night without quite knowing how he’d gotten there.

When an overwhelming scent of blood dripped through his brain, Christopher had to follow it. He had to stop it. Stop the flow? Stop the source? That was it, stop the source—stop the one responsible.

“Responsible for what?” he demanded, looking up at the sky. There was no sky overhead, just sooty darkness.

The cobblestones beneath his feet were slick, slippery. Dirt covered his palm when he leaned against the brick wall of a tenement to catch his breath, and his breath came out in plumes of steam and mixed with a light fog. He had no idea where he was. But there were people on the streets; pale faces of women looked out of alley entrances, lurked in shadows. Working girls, drink-addled and hungry. The wasted creatures eyed him with hope and fear.

Fear. Fear, fear, fear. He couldn’t stand it. Fear and hate. The combination was like oil and water dripping inside him, smothering from the outside, drowning from the inside, leaving dark smears on his soul. He needed to make it stop.

Blood. Follow the blood.

Christopher grabbed a gin bottle from the hand of a man he passed. He smashed it against a wall and hurried on, the
neck gripped in his hand. The drunk’s shouts followed him for a while. He lost the swearing around two corners and up an alley.

He didn’t hesitate when he saw a door open up ahead. The man who came out wore a heavy coat, with a hat pulled down shadowing his face. The reek of blood oozed from him. The stench was all too real.

None of the blood was the man’s. A girl had died. He’d killed her. He’d muttered words as he ripped her apart. Now it was over. It was done. Time to wait. Time to plan. Time to pray.

“No!” Christopher screamed. “No, no, no!” He wasn’t aware that he kept shouting.

The man whirled to face him, quick. Full of venom and bloodlust.

But not strong, not fit. Not the way Captain Christopher Bell was. Not furious the way Christopher was. Not righteous.

Vicious, yes, driven, greedy, but not yet full of demonic fire. No matter how hard he’d prayed, no matter how many sacrifices. Not enough. Certainly not enough.

Christopher ran, ugly alien thoughts jarring through his head. The jagged glass already aimed at the other man’s throat before he knew he was running.

When blood gushed this time, it belonged to the killer. It was Jack the Ripper who bled, fell onto the dirty Whitechapel street, died.

Christopher came to his senses with a broken bottle in his hand. With a dead man’s blood running over his highly polished boots.

“Very nicely done.”

There was nothing of Whitechapel in the rich voice of the woman who’d spoken. There were—layers—though, a hint of pride, a touch of sarcasm, curiosity. Threat.

“Let’s have a look at you.”

There were claws on the hand that turned him to face her. He knew instinctively that he was weak as a kitten against her strength—mental as well as physical. She was—

A beautiful little thing. Dressed in black satin and jet beads. A mourning dress. Pale as a ghost. Maybe she was a ghost. One of the Ripper’s victims?

Christopher shook his head, trying to clear out the foolishness. And bloodlust. And the sick, mental vomit taste of the man he’d killed.

The woman touched his cheek, stroked the tips of her claws ever so gently down his long jaw.

“I’ve never met anyone like you before,” she said.

“Funny, I was thinking the same thing.”

A faint smiled lifted her full, rich lips. “You have the gift of seeing, feeling, acting. But you see thoughts and emotions, color them, smell them. Most of us only hear with our minds. Hear and speak.”

“Us?”

“You’re quick to the point, too.” She traced his face with both hands, this time running her fingertips along his cheeks and down his throat. His pulse raced against her light touch. “Strong mind, stronger will. Born to be my child, I think.”

“I have a mother.”

She laughed, setting off crystal bells in his head. “Well, you’re about to have a second one, my lovely. I do believe I can make something of you.”

“It seems I’ve been found by just the sort of managing woman I don’t want.”

“I shall make you a knight of my realm,” she told him.

Somehow, he couldn’t argue, didn’t want to protest.

She gestured toward the body. “Bring that along, will you? Our kind doesn’t leave our messes in the street.”

CHICAGO, PRESENT

C
hicago really wasn’t any windier than any other city, but tonight it sure felt like it was. Cold, too, and raining, with just a hint of ice in the mix. Ivy Bailey was not a happy vampire hunter at the moment, but you hunted when you had to and remembered to wear a raincoat.

Most vampires sensibly stayed indoors on nights like this, but this one was a stalker. He couldn’t help himself. With the object of his hunger out on the street, that’s where he had to be. Which meant that was where Ivy had to be.

She hated him.

In theory, one should hate all vampires, just as a matter of course, of course. And she did, more or less. But she had particularly vicious thoughts for the stalker she was stalking. He hadn’t yet done anything bad enough to warrant having his heart ripped out—other than force her out on this miserable night—but it was only a matter of time. She hoped. Not that heart ripping would be her job. She was his watcher.
Soaking. Wet. Dripping. Cold. Disgusted. Ivy checked her watch. It was near midnight, and she had to be at work at seven thirty. She was his “going to sleep on her massage table tomorrow and get in trouble” watcher.

“Strigoi,” she grumbled disgustedly under her breath.

Why couldn’t they all live somewhere exotic, like Rio de Janeiro, or winter up at the North Pole? Not that Chicago didn’t have long winter nights for the vampires to strut around in, trying to pick up healthy, fresh-faced, and strong-blooded Midwesterners.

The vampire walking ahead of her must really have it bad for the girl he was following since he hadn’t noticed Ivy yet, and she was only half a block behind him. The street wasn’t exactly bustling with pedestrians. She knew she wasn’t that good at sneaking and lurking. She probably had the rain to thank, along with a sexual obsession that blinded the young vamp’s senses.

Up ahead, a door opened, spilled light, then closed. The same thing happened a few seconds later. Ivy crossed a street and reached the spot where the victim and the vampire had entered. It was a coffee shop. Somewhere warm and dry and with WiFi to spend some time out of the rain. Ivy didn’t go inside immediately. She wasn’t afraid anything untoward would happen in that public place. Well, if the vampire happened to casually introduce himself to the woman of his nocturnal emissions, something untoward might come of it, but there were protocols in place to handle that. If the vampire behaved himself, Ivy could hand the case off to others.

No, Ivy waited in the dark, wet and cold, because someone was following her. A vampire? Why? If not, even more why?

She did briefly consider that she was having an attack of overactive imagination. It was certainly the sort of night for it. But she was a cautious type. Better to make sure something wicked wasn’t coming after her before she entered the
shop, no matter how enticing the coffee scents. There were civilians inside. She had a duty to protect more than one hapless vampire lust object from the monsters roaming the night.

Ivy continued past the welcoming coffee-shop door. She turned right at the end of the block. Stopped. Listened. Peered past the faint glow of a nearby streetlight and reached out with her mind as much as her vision and hearing. Was there a faintly racing heartbeat coming her way? Still might only be imagination. She certainly didn’t hear footsteps or breathing, but the wind was howling, and the rain’s steady beat on the sidewalk was loud enough to cover anyone’s approach. Imagination running away with—

A hand grasped hers.
Run!
a voice shouted in her head. In her head, not her ear.

She barely had time to register the difference before she was being pulled down the side street at a breakneck pace. The street was slick and slippery, making it difficult to keep her footing. Her—rescuer?—sure-footed as a cat, didn’t notice. Looking at the man ahead of her as he pulled her along, she got an image of wide shoulders, and that was about all until he pulled her into a doorway.

She would have bolted away from him, but he grabbed her tightly around the waist. She tried going limp to sag out of his arms, but he knew that trick, and just laughed.

“Very good,” he said. His accent was English, his voice amused. “What are you doing out here anyway?”

He was talking this time, not thinking at her. Good. She understood the principles of telepathy, wasn’t freaked by it, but that didn’t mean she’d ever encountered the difficult speaking-from-mind-to-mind part herself. She could defend against telepathy, too, normally, but guessed she had been too intent on detecting signs of the stalker vampire flimflamming his prey to guard her own mind from intrusion. It
wasn’t the sort of thing people generally tried with her. Most people she knew weren’t stupid.

She had the distinct impression that the man holding her close to his body wasn’t stupid, either. He was large, hard, and warm.

He apparently thought she was. “Do you know what that man you were following
is
? Do you know how dangerous it is for a woman to be out alone at night?”

“Do you know who was following me?” she answered.

It wasn’t he. Her—rescuer?—had come up the side street where she’d been waiting and watching. Unless he’d circled around behind her very fast, he couldn’t be—

“Oh.”

He had been following her.

He was a strigoi, as vampires preferred to call themselves. It wasn’t only modern folk who used bland language to mask evil intent. Care for a little ethnic cleansing to pretty up your genocide, anyone? Vampires were experts at bending words, and laws and customs, to make themselves feel better about what they were.

She’d never met a strigoi with an English accent before. Well, the Enforcer of the City was rumored to be from Britain, but he didn’t have an accent. Ariel had been an American vampire for a long time.

“Were you following me?” she demanded.

“Yes.”

She’d been followed, and grabbed, and snatched by an English strigoi.

“Why?”

“Why were you following that man?”

“I was doing my job.”

She was answered with a loud snort of laughter.

“I know he isn’t a man,” she said. “I was being polite.”

“You know what I am?”

“Of course.”

Hard hands closed around her upper arms. “Are you too stupid to be terrified?”

“That’s a very good question.” She made herself project calm, pretended that she wasn’t afraid.

Another laugh from the vampire. It occurred to her that perhaps this British vampire somehow had permission to hunt in Chicago. Perhaps he was going to try to eat her. But she knew the Laws of the Blood. Surely the Enforcer of the City would have warned of any authorized hunt.

But, if this was a strig, new in town, this could get ugly. For her right now. For this English strigoi after the Enforcer of the City got hold of him. But his eventual punishment wouldn’t give her corpse any satisfaction.

All the while she’d been talking to the strigoi, her body was clasped to his, his strong hands didn’t seem inclined to let her go. Ivy finally tried to take a good look at his face. It was very dark in that shallow refuge from the rain. She had excellent night vision, but she couldn’t make out much detail. He had high, hollow cheeks and a long, pointed nose. No beauty, which was odd for one of his kind. Vampires preferred great looks to go along with the psychic talent that attracted them to those they made into slaves and companions.