Dark Heir

“Not moving at vamp speed? Possible compulsion?” Eli asked, taking us back to the important parts.

Multiple three-bursts from automatic weapons fire erupted over the coms system. Over it all and up the elevator shaft also echoed the piercing wails of vamps dying, high-pitched and eardrum piercing. Eli ripped off his earpieces and left the headset hanging.

I yanked mine away and then stuck it back to hear Derek say, “Best guess. Things have been dicey ever since Adrianna got here.”

Despite the heat, I was suddenly cold all over and swore silently to myself. “Adrianna? How many times do I have to kill her?” Adrianna had been on the losing side in multiple attempts to take over the position of Master of the City of New Orleans, and I’d staked her more than once in retribution. She was gorgeous, violent, and even more wacko than most vamps. I’d been paid for her head not so long ago, but for reasons that had never made sense, Leo had, once again, refused to kill Adrianna true-dead. “When did she get here?” I pulled a vamp-killer and a silver stake. No more Mr. Nice Guy. This time when I saw her, her head was gonna roll.

“Last night about eleven. Leo welcomed her and put her on sub-four in a room that used to belong to her and her scions.”

“Stairs from sub-three opening into the closet? Lock on the outside? Everything falling off the walls? Everything rotten?” I asked.

“Stairs and lock, yes. Same room, but redecorated.”

“So he knew she was coming,” I spat. “He’s known for a while.”

“Best guess.” Derek didn’t sound happy about it. “I shoulda called,” he added, a familiar ring of self-blame in his words, “I get that. But it looked like the usual vamp crazy shit.”

“Language,” Alex muttered, his voice tight as he monitored coms.

“Company,” Eli said, his voice calm, cold, and uncompromising. His combat voice. He nodded to the elevator shaft.

“Fighting’s supposed to be contained in the ballroom,” I said.

“Yeah,” Eli said, adjusting his weapons. “Funny how things change.”

But the elevator wasn’t moving, hadn’t arrived. The doors opened slowly, an unbalanced, uneven motion, the way they’d move if hands forced them open instead of the electronics. Rather than the beautifully decorated, ice white and cream-of-tartar–toned elevator, we saw an empty shaft, black, dank, and dark.

From the shaft came the stink of vamp and human blood and the recorded strains of Chris LeDoux singing “This Cowboy’s Hat.” It was an odd combo. “Blood,” I whispered, as air from the lower floors reached me. “Human and vamp. And . . . holy crap.”

Something in my voice alerted Eli, because he switched weapons faster than I could follow and pulled up his small subgun loaded with silver ammo. A black form rose in the open shaft. Eli started firing, to heck with three-burst rounds. He shot in bursts of what sounded like ten rounds each before a short pause and a second burst. Eli emptied one mega-mag and slammed a fresh one home.

In the full second and a half that it took Eli to remove and replace the magazine, the form slithered/slid/floated/flew out of the shaft. So fast it looked feathery. Beast rammed into the front of my brain. As black as the unlit chute, as dark as a minion of hell, the thing crawled across the floor on all fours, moving like a centipede, feathery, fast, as graceful as an insect or a bird or . . . a lizard. That was it. Whipping and undulating like a hybrid of an insect and a lizard, its head and neck and limbs working together and yet totally separate to propel it forward.

In an act that I had never, ever wanted to experience again, Beast reached through me and brought up the Gray Between, the gray place my skinwalker energies were stored. No, I thought at her. She ignored me. Time slowed fractionally, then more. And again, to a consistency of tar, a hot, clinging thickness to the air. The thing was Joses Bar-Judas. A Son of Darkness. Leo’s prisoner. Until now.

The last time I saw him, he had been a sack of bones hanging on the wall of the lowest subbasement, crucified there with silver spikes, held in place with silver chains and several pocket watches, each containing a piece of the iron spike of Golgotha. He had been a dried-out, leathery husk of a thing, nowhere near human, blackened all over, with insane, glittering black eyes. He’d also been overly chatty for a nutcase with a dried-out strip of jerky for a tongue. And I had thrown a silver knife into his throat to shut him up.

In hindsight I could see that might have been unwise.

CHAPTER 2

Warp My Sexual Development Forever

His black eyes settled on me and his mouth opened slowly, so slowly, to reveal a maw full of cracked and broken teeth, brown with age, and fangs like tusks in his upper and lower jaws. Even in the time bubble created by my Beast and me, Joses Bar-Judas could see me, see us. Power rippled across him, sparking white and black, colder than an arctic snow, hotter than volcanic ash falling from a flaming sky. The power didn’t so much dance across his skin as sizzle. So unbelievably powerful. And that was new. That meant he’d fed, and well.

I didn’t know how it had been arranged or carried out, but the fight among vamps on sub-three and -four had been a diversion. For this guy.

In the bubble that let me stand outside of time, he altered course, shifting trajectory fractionally, heading right for us. Eli was squeezing the trigger of the subgun. From inside the bubble I could see the silver-lead rounds leaving the muzzle of the gun, spiraling and twisting, half an inch at a time, a puff of black dust exploding out with each round. And Joses, a Son of Darkness, ducked to evade them. He was that fast.

Faster than HQ’s ambient time, I unsheathed a silver-plated vamp-killer. Leaped forward, taking the time bubble with me, ducking beneath the rounds blasting forward and the hot brass discharging out to the side of Eli’s gun. My right arm extended in front of me, point forward, more like the way one would use a sword than the way one would hold a knife in a knife fight. I heard the deep tones of a voice in my earpiece, the word so slow the sound was meaningless.

I pushed off with my toes, stretching into the lunge, feeling the new muscle memory of sword practice supporting my intent. Joses opened his fingers, exposing his hand. Around his neck was a gold chain, like a necklace, with red things dangling from it like rubies. On his wrist he wore a bracelet, half-hidden by the tatters of clothing, or maybe tatters of half-mummified flesh; it too was shiny gold.

My eyes latched onto his black ones, his desiccated lips moving. Shock thrummed through me like the single tone of a large bell, recently struck, vibrating, a pounding pulse of surprise.