Hellforged

The hint that something worse than Pryce could be at work, perhaps something involving the shadowy Old Ones, should have kept me tossing and turning for the rest of the night. But when the last wisps of Mab’s colors had blown away, I snuggled against Kane and sank deeply into sleep—blessedly dreamless sleep.

FOR THE NEXT SEVERAL DAYS, I TOOK THINGS EASY. KANE GOT called back to Washington for some strategy meetings. I was glad to see him jump back into the fray. Kane’s never happy unless he’s doing something to save the world. Me? Saving the world’s okay, but afterward I need a break.

I stayed home and ordered pizza (sometimes the zombie deliveryman even left me more than one slice). I watched Juliet’s movie screen-sized TV. I called my sister, Gwen, who was surprised and pleased to hear from me. She even put the kids on the phone. Gwen invited me out to Needham for one of her famous homemade lasagna dinners. I hope she won’t mind my bringing a werewolf as my date.

I slept, too—a lot. With Difethwr dead and Pryce out of commission, I was off Mab’s no-dreaming tea. It was wonderful to be back in my own dreamscape. I slept deeply and without images, resting in a soft, tranquil twilight. Not utter darkness. My dreamscape looked a lot better with a night-light on.

Initial news reports about the concert were confused, inaccurate, and fear-mongering. Stories varied wildly on how many zombies were killed (the actual number was fifteen, including Monster Paul’s bass player and the two cemetery guards), but the dead zombies got less attention than the single norm who died. During the Morfran-induced stampede, a human had been trampled to death. A news camera had captured footage of several zombies who, intoxicated by the smell of human blood, couldn’t resist stopping to chomp on a limb or two.

What the cameras didn’t capture was the Morfran. Despite hundreds of eyewitness reports of a flock of murderous birds that would’ve made Hitchcock proud, there was no hard evidence. As a spirit, the Morfran couldn’t be filmed without special equipment. So on video, it looked like the zombies had come down with a sudden, vicious case of mass hysteria as they screamed and ran and waved their arms. Self-proclaimed medical experts speculated their behavior was an aftereffect of the plague virus. Anti-PA groups, talk-radio pundits, and some politicians called for immediate expulsion of all zombies from the state.

I hate publicity—I’d prefer a root canal to a TV interview—but I couldn’t let all that misinformation swirl around unchecked. I resolved to call Lynne Hong and go on the record to set things straight. But I didn’t have to. She’d already scored an interview with Daniel.

He looked great on-screen. Photogenic, charming, his face serious and his blue eyes calm, he explained that the concert had been the target of a terror attack by a rogue sorcerer. Police had a suspect, Pryce Maddox, and an intensive manhunt was under way to find him. There was even one of those police sketches. That helped; it gave the norms a face to watch out for, a face to blame. Throughout the interview, Daniel painted the zombies as victims of an attack, not monsters run amok. His account was way oversimplified—Pryce wasn’t really a sorcerer, and Daniel didn’t go into demi-demons and ancient prophecies—but he presented the events in terms the norms could understand.

Daniel was all business as he looked into the camera, but at the end of the interview he turned directly to Lynne Hong, and the look on his face made me suspect that an interview wasn’t the only thing she’d scored from Detective Costello.

I picked up the phone and called him. “So,” I said, “are you looking for a job now?”

He laughed. “No, I’m still employed. As soon as the story broke—it hit the Internet yesterday—I got hauled into Hampson’s office. I knew he was going to fire me. I’d made my peace with that. But before he could start chewing me out, the governor’s office called. By the end of the conversation, Hampson looked like he’d sat on a porcupine. Governor Sugden asked him to thank me for getting the facts out.” He laughed. “Thank me—can you imagine?”

Sugden’s adult daughter was a zombie, so he was sympathetic to PAs. He also knew Hampson very well. The governor publicly praised Daniel for identifying a suspect so fast, making sure Hampson got some of the credit. There was talk of giving both Daniel and Norden public service awards as soon as Norden was released from the hospital. Hampson couldn’t fire Daniel now, not without making himself look bad.

He could, however, assign Daniel a new partner. “The guy’s a Hampson stooge and a PA hater,” Daniel told me. “In fact, he’s the one Sykes nailed in Creature Comforts. Now, any time I sneeze Hampson will get a report about it. I’ve got to be careful.”

That made what I had to say next a little easier. Knowing me had caused Daniel nothing but trouble at work. “Um, Daniel, I should tell you that Kane and I—”

“Are back together. I know, Vicky. That was pretty obvious the other night.”

He stopped there, and I didn’t know what else to say. Just as the silence was stretching past uncomfortable into intolerable, Daniel broke it. “Speaking of Kane, I wanted to let you know I’ve been assigned a new case. Homicide in D.C. has asked for our assistance in their investigation of Justice Frederickson’s murder. They think the evidence points here. Not to Kane,” he added quickly.

“What’s going on?”

“They’re giving a press conference this afternoon. Juliet’s been named a ‘vampire of interest.’ ”

“She didn’t do it.”

“I don’t know if you’re in contact with her,” he said, his voice careful, “and I’m not asking. But she should turn herself in. If she’s innocent, it’s the only way to clear things up. She can ask for me; I’ll make sure she’s treated well.”

Juliet wasn’t going to waltz into the police station and ask for Daniel, because Juliet wasn’t anywhere near Boston. I knew because I’d received a postcard from her. The picture showed an ancient-looking, half-timbered house with gables along the roof and red flowers blossoming in front. No writing on the back besides my name and address. But only Juliet would send me a postcard of Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon. The postmark was Brazilian. She was telling me she was okay—or had been when she mailed the card—but was on the move.

I didn’t tell Daniel. If Juliet was running from the Old Ones, I wasn’t going to complicate things by putting the police on her trail.

I went online to the Channel 10 website and watched Daniel’s interview again, paying less attention to what he said than to how he looked at Lynne Hong. Definitely something there. I knew, because he’d looked at me the exact same way. An unexpected pang hit me, but I let it go. Maybe Daniel would find something with Lynne that he couldn’t with me. Maybe it’s easier to fall for somebody you can rescue than for someone who’s always rescuing you.

BY FRIDAY, I WAS TIRED OF ZOMBIE-GNAWED PIZZA AND READY to rejoin the world. As I entered Creature Comforts, inhaling that familiar scent of spilled beer, smoke, and a whiff of blood, I waved to Axel. He nodded and set a bottle of beer on the bar. Then he went back to terrorizing a wide-eyed female norm.

“I told you, we don’t do chocolate martinis. We got beer, we got shots. You want dessert, find a bakery.”

“Try this,” I suggested, showing her the label of my lite beer as I slid onto a stool. “It doesn’t taste like anything. Honest.”

She scurried back to her table, where her three norm friends waited. They gathered up their purses and, with a few petrified glances back at Axel, they fled.

“You sure that’s good for business, scaring away the customers?” It was early, but the bar was dead—and I didn’t mean that as a pun. Other than a lone werewolf reading News of the Dead at the far end of the bar, I was the only customer.

“If I never have to mix another froufrou cocktail, it’s worth it.” Axel went to fiddle with a beer line.

Business had slumped throughout the New Combat Zone. Zombies needed a permit again to set foot outside the boundaries of Deadtown—even into the Zone—and permits were tougher to get than they’d been in years. All but the most adventurous norms were staying far away from the monsters’ turf. And without norms, you didn’t get vampires. Creature Comforts was back to being a one-man operation. Or a one-whatever-Axel-was operation.

Down the bar, the werewolf turned a page, rattling his paper, and I glimpsed the headline: “Monster Paul Tour Canceled.” I’d seen the story on PNN. The band had lost its bass player, for one thing. And though Daniel’s interview had done a lot to quell the first wave of norm panic, crazy theories persisted. One of the craziest called Monster Paul’s music satanic, causing listeners to become mindless killing machines. Monster rock might sound like a truckload of cranky babies trying to out-yowl a crate full of angry cats while chimpanzees beat washtubs in the background, but a satanic zombie mind-control plot? Come on.

One venue after another canceled, and Monster Paul and the Zombie Freak Show were grounded before their tour began. I felt bad for Tina, but she’d be okay. She had a safety career. Demon fighting? Nah, that was last week’s safety career. Now she was writing her memoirs. Working title: Tina Terror: The Zombie Who Saved Boston, Broke Some Hearts, and Almost Went on the Road.

“ ‘ Broke some hearts’?” I’d asked, cocking an eyebrow.

“You don’t know everything about me,” she’d snapped, then grinned. “Anyway, by the time I write that part it’ll probably be true.”

If the title was any indication of her writing skills, I had a feeling she’d be begging me to take her back as my apprentice soon.

The door opened, and Kane entered, brushing snowflakes from the shoulders of his coat. He came over, swept me into a hug, and nuzzled my neck in a way that made me glad I was already sitting down.

“How was your trip?”

“Smooth. Not a single Glitch.” His smile reminded me how much I’d missed him. “I packed some of that hairspray in my carry-on, just in case.” ns class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block" data-ad-client="ca-pub-7451196230453695" data-ad-slot="9930101810" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true">