Midnight Blues (5 page)

Rafael wondered what Daniela’s native language was. Her Spanish was flawless, but it was the language of the school room, not that of a native speaker. “How were you able to resist him?”

She avoided his gaze now. “I stayed in the jungle at night, in places he didn’t know. Then Sister Marguerite came during the day, while he was sleeping. She found me and took me away to a convent in Rio. She said I would be safe there, and for a long time I was, but then he came again. When the Mother Superior would not let him in, he began taking people from the streets.” Her voice broke. “He hurt them in terrible ways first. Then he killed them and left their bodies outside the convent. Like the man last night.”

Rafael took her hands in his. “But you escaped him again.”

“Sister Marguerite moved me to another place, but he found me again. He climbed over the walls at night and walked about the place, looking for me, calling my name.” She twisted her hands together, so tightly that all of her tendons strained. “When I didn’t go to him, he killed all the nuns and left a message written in their blood on the wall. He said I could never escape him.”

The way she spoke of what happened bothered him as much as her Spanish—again, the stuff of the school room. Daniela’s speech patterns were more like a child’s. “That’s why Sister Marguerite brought you to America.”

“After she made him think that we were both dead, yes. But he is here now, and he knows. I must go away before he kills any more people.” She held out her wrists. “Will you take them off now?”

“In a moment.” Rafael slipped off the veil covering her long hair. It spilled around her face in soft, dark waves. “When did you take your vows?”

“Last year.” She swallowed and looked away again.

Rafael leaned closer. “What was the name of your village?”

“It was—it had no name. It was only the village.”

“This convent where you took your vows, what was it called?” When she groped for an answer, he asked, “The name of the one that burned down? What was it? And the name of your order?”

“They are gone.” She almost stuttered the words. “I can’t remember.”

“You’ve never taken vows.” A fierce and completely unexpected satisfaction filled him. “You’re not a nun.”

“I have, I was… I said—”

“They shave your head when you pledge yourself to Christ,” he said, grabbing a fistful of her hair, dragging it around in front of her eyes. “Now tell me the truth.”

“I don’t know,” she shouted, and then hunched her shoulders and tried to curl away from him. “They never told me. I was from the compound. I was not like them. They would not speak to me.” She twisted, yanking her hair from his grasp.

He held onto her arms. “What compound?”

“It was in the jungle, near the village. It was why Donatien came to Argentina. To see it. To touch the Father’s things, and to look through the photos and read his journals. He took pleasure in them, laughed over them as if they were amusing. I watched him through the windows.”

“Look at me, Daniela.” When she wouldn’t, Rafael lifted her chin and used his thumbs to wipe away the incessant tears. “I can help you, but I have to know the truth.”

She went rigid. “Marguerite made me promise. She said if anyone knew, if anyone saw, that they would lock me away and never let me go.”

Rafael was glad the old nun was dead. “I will not. I will not permit anyone to do that to you.”

All the fight went out of her. “It won’t make any difference. He has found me. But I will show you.” Dull-eyed now, she looked across the room. “That fern there, the brown one. Would you bring it to me, please?”

Rafael reluctantly released her, and went over to the hanging plant that, like every other thing he had attempted to grow in the apartment, had died. Brittle brown leaves showered his arms as he took it down and carried it to the bed. “This is a lost cause, I think.”

“No. Not yet.” Slowly, almost painfully, she brought her cuffed hands to the dead thing. “The Father ran so many tests on me, but he could never find out how, or make another like me again. It angered him.” She plunged her hands into the dry, scratchy snarl of leaves.

Rafael felt it first. A warmth that, given the efficiency of his apartment’s air conditioning, should not have spread as it did. But within a few seconds it created a pool around the bed, causing beads of sweat to gather in his temples and streak down his back.

Daniela closed her eyes and seemed to shrink in on herself, as if squeezed by the growing heat.

The vibrations came next. Rafael had felt something similar whenever his master lost his temper or used his talent. Lucan often caused any glass in close proximity to shatter whenever that happened. Yet these waves did not have the same, destructive feel to them. They seemed to dance around him, unseen creatures of the air.

“What…” Rafael glanced down at the fern, which began rustling around the girl’s hands. The dead leaves slowly straightened out of their lifeless curls, and their color paled to yellow.

Daniela opened her eyes, which had turned a ghostly blue. “It was almost gone,” she whispered, a note of censure in her soft voice. “I cannot bring them back when they are gone. There has to be a little left.”

Rafael hardly heard her. The fern’s yellow leaves had begun to glow with something that was not light or heat but part of both. The base of each leaf turned a dark green that quickly devoured the yellow as it spread to each tip. Daniela’s eyes closed a second time, and the entire plant shook, its stalks stabbing up into the air and spreading like eager fingers. At last she took her hands from the pot, and sagged back against the pillows.

The heat pressing around them vanished as if it had never been.

Rafael carefully picked up the plant and turned it around in his hands. It was as fresh and full of life as the day he had brought it home. He looked over it at the huddled form in his bed. “How long have you been able to do this?”

“Since I was born.” Her exhausted voice matched the color of her skin. She lifted her hands. “Do you have bandages?”

“Why?”

“There is a price for what I do.” She extended her arms, showing him bloody fingers and palms, swollen wrists and bruised forearms.

With a curse he pulled a small key from his pocket and released the cuffs around her wrists, sitting down and gently examining her wounds. “Does this happen every time?”

She wouldn’t look at him. “Sometimes it is not so bad. Sometimes it is worse.” A bitter curl twisted her mouth. “But now you know.”

He stared at her. “It is not only plants.”

“I can do it for animals and people. Anything that has some life left in it. That is why Donatien wants me. For the ones he hurts.” She stared at the fern. “Because I can keep them alive.”

Samantha started her shift on Halloween by stopping at the Chief of Homicide’s office. “I’ve got some updates on the convent murder.”

Ernesto Garcia closed the file he was reading. “Tell me.”

She took out her PDA and punched up her notes. “Victim identified as Erik Bergen, age thirty-two, single, lives alone, no kids. Currently owns a fetish place called Club Dominion. No significant other, no family other than an elderly father in Brooklyn. NYPD will handle the notification.”

“Dominion’s that one across from the Ambassador’s Towers?” When she nodded, he said, “I thought that was a private B.Y.O.B. club.”

“Bergen got a liquor license and opened it to the public about a year ago,” she said. “Clientele’s been busted a few times since for indecent exposure, public sex during vice sweeps, but no working girls or anything else to blow air up the Mayor’s tasteful skirt. It’s a place to dress out and hookup. How long are we going to do this?”

“As long as it takes.” He glanced up and saw her expression. “If you’re talking about Suarez, he won’t be in. Kyn business.”

“I’m Kyn now, but I guess I don’t count.” Sam sat down and took a pocket recorder from her jacket. “This is voice-activated. For those times when you guys decide that Sam can’t handle that all-important, hush-hush Kyn business.”

She switched on the tape, which played a conversation first between Lucan and Rafael, and then between Lucan and Herbert Burke. When it was finished, she switched it off.

“I like the parts where everyone decides what’s good for me, and that no one is to speak to me about a guy who appears to be the prime suspect in my fucking murder case,” she said sweetly. “Don’t you?”

Garcia picked up the recorder and regarded it the same way he might a dead rat. “Somehow I doubt the suzerain will appreciate the fact that you’ve bugged his office.”

“I will deal with the suzerain later, I assure you.” Her temper, which had been simmering since she’d listened to the tape, flared. “Now can we stop dancing around this and you give me some answers? Or do I go start roughing up some vampires, starting with my partner?”

His expression shuttered. “I can’t tell you anything more than what is on that tape.”

“You’re Rafael’s
tresora
, of course you can.” She waited for him to reply. “I am a decent cop, you know. I can just go looking for them. Guy likes to cruise fetish clubs, right? We don’t have that many around here, and I’m in the mood to go beat the hell out of someone anyway.”

Garcia hissed in a breath. “You can’t. Samantha, there are some things about the Kyn that you’re better off not knowing. Donatien—the Marquis—is one of them.”

“So they
are
talking about the same person. Thought so.” She enjoyed his wince over the slip. “This Donatien may be Kyn, but he killed Erik Bergen, which makes it my business.”

“Donatien is not Kyn.” He rubbed a hand over his shaved scalp. “You remember Faryl, the changeling who tried to kill Lucan?”

“Snake-man, sure,” she said. “I cut off his tail. Made him kind of unforgettable.”

“Faryl was what happens to a Kyn when they live only on animal blood,” Garcia told her. “There have been Kyn who went the other way, who refused to curtail their hunger. They not only kill humans, they toy with them. Like cats with mice.”

“So he’s out of control.”

“That was how he began, and he was among the worst of us. Then something happened.” Garcia seemed to be choosing his words with great care. “It should have killed him, but instead it made him more powerful, more dangerous.”

She folded her arms. “I’m not leaving until you give me all the facts, Cap.”

Ernesto rose to his feet and went to the one window he had in his office, which overlooked the department parking lot. “If I do, Lucan will have my head.”

“I’ll have it if you don’t, and you have to work with me every day,” she reminded him. “Him you can dodge.”

He nodded and went to his filing cabinet, taking out a folder and handing it to her. “That is what current information we have. It’s not much. Rumors, a few unconfirmed sightings, unsolved murder sprees in the Middle East and Germany.”

She opened the folder and made an exasperated sound. “It’s written in French, which I don’t speak or read.” She pulled out a sketch of a man so beautiful he made Brad Pitt look like a troll. “
This
is the monster?”

“That is Donatien Alphonse François,” Garcia told her. “Better known as Le Marquis de Sade.”

D
ani dreamed of the one place in the world where she had never felt afraid: the jungle beyond the compound. On warm, moonlit nights, when the Father’s men had gone into the village to drink and chase women, she had slipped under the fence and into that cool, green darkness.

The Father had told her that it was impossible for her to remember her mother (
she died birthing you
,
Cristál
, he would always say, hating her with his eyes) but Dani felt her presence in every shadow, heard her whisper in every movement through the leaves. Mama had belonged to the jungle, had been buried by the Father somewhere in it, and so she had become a part of Dani’s rare night wanderings.

Tonight she felt her mother as if from a distance, but that hint of tender love was all she needed. She raced through the brush, chasing it not in desperation but in a playful, teasing fashion that made her mother’s ghost laugh.

Until the dark man stepped out into the moonlight, blocking her path.

Daniela
. He held out his hand, tiny golden lights filling the palm.
Don’t run away from me
.

She stayed. She had never like men very much—the Father often hurt her, and the guards despised and feared her—but the dark man felt different. He smelled wonderful, too, not at all like the sour odor that clung to everyone at the compound. She went to him, and when she reached for his hand, he tossed up the lights, showering her with their cool, tickling sparkles.

“Rafael.” She remembered his name from the other place. His name became poetry on her tongue, and she savored it twice more. “Rafael, Rafael. How did you find me?”

We are sharing a dream
, he told her, clasping her wrists with his hands.
Is this your home
?

Dani had never thought of the jungle as anything but freedom. It did not belong to her, and the Father would never permit her to live in it. Home was the compound, where everyone feared the Father and what he did in the white-washed rooms. She did not want to think about that, not here. Here she came to be, to run, to forget.

“I wish it were,” she told him.

I had a place like this, once, a long time ago
. A flock of green parrots fluttered around them, and he drew her closer, holding her to his side.
Can you show me the compound
?

Somewhere in the shadows, a jaguar growled.

“Do I have to?” When Rafael nodded, she sighed and guided him down the old path to the clearing where the Father had made the compound. The rusting, barbed wire fence sagged in places, some parts of it cut out and missing. A few ghosts scrounged around the burned and gutted buildings, the old ones who still thought they were alive, and could pick through the debris for scrap to sell in city.

Someone burned it to the ground
?

“The Father did before he left the country.” She stared at the place where she had been so miserable. “Men came from Europe—not his men, but others that were angry with him—so he set fire to the top part.” She took him to one of the lower level entrances, pushing aside the tool shed that concealed it. “The soldiers came and took things and burned it, and I had to go live in the village. They never did find the bottom part.”