Dave Carver (Book 1): Thicker Than Blood (11 page)

Chapter 15

As much as Flavian’s warehouse had given me the willies during the day, it was a dozen times scarier at night. There were no lights on inside, and more importantly the sun wasn’t at my back—there was nothing to stop a vampire from rushing out.

Fortunately, May was prepared. She drew a piece of thin wood from a loop on her belt, pointed it at the vaulted ceiling, and snapped a word in a language that was so dead there was nothing left of it but bones. A ball of fire burst from the tip of the wand and rose into the air. It oscillated in color from scarlet to magenta to orange, casting the darkness inside the warehouse in a strangely slow-moving strobe.

Five vampires stood in the circle of the shade-of-red light, snarling. That was much fewer than had been here when I talked to Flavian earlier in the day. I guessed the rest were out hunting. They made no pretense of hiding their vampireness—their skin was withered, their eyes were black, and their teeth were sharp—and they stared at us in astonishment. It would have been funny if their expressions of shock weren't changing into something aggressive, something angry. Such inexpressible hatred that it would have been impossible for a human face to replicate it. (And trust me, humans are pretty good at hating.)

Two vampires nearest the door suddenly pounced,
hissing
like threatened tomcats. I snarled a curse. May aimed her wand, casual as you please, said another dead word, and one of the vampires reversed direction in midair. He slammed into a rusty old shelf with a loud crack of bone breaking, hit the ground, and didn’t move. I took a sidestep, and the other attacking vampire sailed harmlessly past me out to the sidewalk. As he went by I swung the sword down. The magically-enhanced steel hummed as it cut through dead skin, muscle, and bone. The vampire sprawled to the ground. His right leg ended just below the knee. He curled up in a ball, clutching at the stump of his leg and whimpering.

I stood over the wounded vampire and put the point of the sword at the side of his neck. He winced as the blade scraped his gray skin. Once a vampire’s gone black-eyes it’s hard to make out details about his appearance, but I recognized this guy from earlier. He had a hawkish nose and a slicked-back greasy pompadour.

Blood trickled out onto the floor—slowly, since the vampire didn’t have a heartbeat to pump it faster—and shone black under the light of May’s fireball spell, like an oil spill. I stepped over the vampire’s wounded form to avoid getting any of the nasty stuff on my boots.

Slick the vampire’s three friends took a couple of steps forward. I drew the knife that May had given to me and pointed it at them, warning them, stopping them dead in their tracks. Looked like the knife was gonna be getting its first taste of blood sooner than I’d thought.

May shifted the aim of her wand so it was pointing at the spot between the lead vamp’s eyes, and she said, “Easy, boys.”

“I want to talk to Flavian,” I said. The vampire at my feet swiped weakly. I avoided the blow and pushed the sword into his neck, hard enough that drops of black blood welled up on his skin. “You heard the lady, Slick. Nobody moves. That means you, too.”

May pointed her wand at the fireball in the ceiling and said, “
Luxiperf
,” which I was pretty sure was nonsense. Brightly colored sparks began dropping from the fireball like hailstones. They pelted the vampires and the air filled with the smell of burned meat and singed cloth and hair. After a few moments of taking this abuse, the vampires that were still standing retreated deeper into the warehouse so they were outside the line of fire. The rain of sparks continued, forming a fence between the vampires and us.

“Relax, fellas,” I said. “We’re just here to pick your boss’s brain. I don’t want to hurt anyone, but if somebody makes a move I don’t like Slick here loses his head.”

“I’ve already told you everything I know about Jack McCreary’s death, Captain Carver.” Flavian’s voice echoed oddly from somewhere in the back of the warehouse. “The
first
time that you rudely barged into my home.”

He stood on the top step of the staircase to the foreman’s office along the back wall. I could just barely make him out among the gloomy shadows and behind the old metal. As he started down the stairs, something moved in the office and the door slowly closed. Though the vampire’s words and tone were nothing but polite, there was something dangerous in his body language that made me hesitate.

Screw it. I was dangerous, too.

“That was before another one of my people turned up dead.”

“I told you this morning, Captain: I have no interest in harming you or your people.” Flavian stepped into the light afforded by May’s fireworks show. The black in his eyes was retreating to the edges of his pupils. He was getting his anger under control.

“Well, Ambassador,” I said, “I guess I don’t believe you.”

“And what evidence leads you to this skepticism?”

I grinned and pointed the knife at him, through the shower of Technicolor sparks. “Call it a hunch. You know more than you’re saying, and I want to know what that is. So spill.”

“And how do you propose to make me talk?” He smiled, and as he did his teeth began to grow and sharpen. The bastard thought he could unnerve me by showing a little fang.

I dug the sword a little harder into the vampire’s throat. “I don’t expect you care too much about this guy. But you do care about your power and appearances. I wonder how the rest of the supe community will see it if you let one of your people get killed in your own base of operations. Right. Under. Your nose. Tell me, Flave, how do you think your rivals would react to that kind of weakness?”

Flavian’s smile evaporated. “You don’t have to do this, Carver. I am not your enemy. You don’t want to make me your enemy.”

“The way I see it,” I said, “we
are
enemies. Your people are at war with mine. Vampires have tried to kill me—
twice
—in the last twenty-four hours, give or take. As far as I’m concerned it’s time to start returning the favor. So talk, or Slick gets a
really
short haircut.”

“Let him up.” For the first time, panic had crept into the edges of Flavian’s voice. “Please.”

“Absolutely. Just as soon as you tell me who murdered Jack McCreary and Kim Larsen.”

Flavian glared.

“Last chance,” I said. “I’ll count to five. If you haven’t started talking by the time I get there...well, I bet you can figure out what’ll happen. One.”

At my feet, Slick howled in terror. Flavian licked his lips with an abnormally long tongue. “I’ve been telling you the truth. Why can’t you see that?”

“Two.”

“I’ve already told you all I know.”

I was undeterred. He was a vampire. Lying was part of the job description: drink blood at night, sleep during the day, and in between, lie as much as possible.

“Three.”

Flavian looked at Slick now. The wounded vampire howled. (Honestly, if he wasn’t a vampire, I’d almost have felt sorry for him.) The ambassador shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me or to Slick.

“Four.”

“You’ll regret this,” said Flavian. Then he closed his eyes.

“Five.”

I cut off Slick’s head. The bloodstained blade hit the floor, sending up a shower of blue sparks. The head rolled away and bumped against my boot. Slick’s empty eyes stared up at me for a moment. And then Father Time came a-calling. First the vampire’s skin and greasy hair withered away at an unimaginable rate. Then the muscles shriveled and vanished, like a piece of paper in a fire. The nerves and the tendons followed, until all that remained was cloth and bone.

The immediate silence made my ears ache. No one moved. No one spoke. I could feel every eye in the warehouse burning into me.

As Slick’s death scream faded away, the rest of the vampires began to hiss. Blue lips pulled away from yellow fangs. Black eyes stared unblinking. Even Flavian’s face took on a tinge of grayness.

May pointed her wand at the ceiling once more. The sparks began falling faster and brighter, causing little fires wherever they hit the ground. The vampires slowed, hesitated.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Flavian said, his voice little more than a cough. “We don’t have to be enemies.”

“You’re a vampire,” I said. “You eat people. We really, really do.”

He shook his head, like a professor disappointed with a favorite student. “You short-sighted ape! I want this war to end peacefully.”

“See, that’s your problem,” I said. “I don’t. I want it to end with every single one of you bloodsucking sons of bitches in embers. As long as your people want to treat mine like cattle, there can’t be peace.”

“I didn’t want it to be like this.”

I shrugged as casually as I could while holding a bloodstained sword in one hand and a hunting dagger in the other. “I did. Think about it Flava Flave. Maybe you’ll remember something.”

“I’ll be seeing you soon, Captain.”

“Come on, May,” I said.

Together, the two of us backed out of the warehouse, the falling sparks the only thing covering our escape.

Chapter 16

“What the hell was that?” May’s voice cracked, as I sped through the empty street of Brooklyn. Adrenaline was making me step too hard on the gas pedal, and I let up a bit. “You just killed an innocent—”

“Innocent?” I snarled. “May, he was a vampire. He wasn’t an innocent anything.”

“We’re not at war with Flavian,” she said. “Or at least we weren’t. Now...I don’t know what happens.”

“Do you seriously believe that? That Flavian and his merry band of hippie vampires just want to make love not war? Come on, May, it’s bull and you know it.”

“I
don’t
know that,” May said. “And if it was true, you just gave him the push he needed to go back to the Elders.”

I glowered out at the beam of the headlights, my hands tight on the wheel. “You saw his eyes. He’s as much a monster as any of them. He hides it with that scholarly exterior, but that’s all it is. A mask.”

“Maybe. But if you’re wrong, you just exposed the Table to
another
war.” She shook her head. “Take it from me, that doesn’t exactly get you a seat at the cool kids’ table in the cafeteria.”

“I exposed a flaw in his armor. He’s gonna be too busy fighting off challengers to his turf to come after us.” I grinned a little, savoring the image of Flavian snarling and slashing as a few of his followers circled him like a pack of wild dogs.

“But we could have
used
him, Dave,” May said. “That’s what I’m saying. He could have been an asset to the Table.”

“Oh.” Maybe she was right about that. The whole “keep your enemies closer” thing. Yeah, that could have worked.

May chuckled. “Not so good at diplomacy yet, are you?”

I scowled. “Guess not.”

I drove in silence for a while, anger bubbling inside me like an overcooked soup. May was the one who’d dragged me into this mess, and now she was questioning the way I was doing things? She knew me—she should have known that I wasn’t gonna play along with Flavian’s pretensions of diplomacy and ambassadorship.

As hard as I tried, I just couldn’t feel bad about killing a vampire. I hated them. After everything they’d done to me, I thought that hatred was justified.

Once we were safely out of the dead neighborhood that had been claimed as the vampires’ turf, May looked at me and said, “You may be right.” Before I could argue that I was a hundred percent right, she continued: “But what if you just did exactly what somebody wanted you to do?”

“Somebody like who?”

“All of the Round Table’s intelligence tells us that the Elders and Flavian don’t exactly get along. They supposedly see him as this...coward and traitor. What if you just opened a gate for the Elders’ two biggest enemies to destroy each other?” I frowned and May continued. “Kim gets killed, right? Anyone who knows anything about the Round Table knows that the leaders will storm off to question Flavian. But anybody who knows
you
will know that you’ll probably be incredibly angry. Maybe you do something that damages the relationships between Flavian and the Table. There’s a chance the confrontation goes violent and—
abra kadabra
—the two biggest threats to the Elders are at each others’ throats.”

I grunted. She was right. It was possible that someone had used my anger, my hatred of vampires, against me. I gritted my teeth. Everything seemed to slow down and my head felt heavy. Well, there was nothing to be done for it now. All that was left was to prepare for battle.

I stared at the black metal phone. The rotary holes stared back, dark and empty as vampire eyes. I’d been entrusted with this monumentally important job, and I’d stumbled out of the gate. You had to admire the incompetence. In one day I’d gotten one of my people killed and possibly committed the Table to
another
war. It usually took a concentrated effort to screw up
that
badly.

I needed to call Bill.

William Foster Pendragon wasn’t just the leader of the Round Table. He wasn’t just my mentor. He was the closest thing I had to a father. I’d met Bill at a time when I thought I wanted to die. It’s a long story, but everyone I’d ever loved had been killed by vampires, and I was preparing to launch myself on a suicide mission for vengeance. I was seventeen. Bill had saved my life and in a very real way, he was my oldest living friend. I hated the idea that I’d disappointed him. He’d trusted me with this massive job. He was counting on me to find the parties responsible for McCreary’s death and stop them. To stop the vampires’ plans in New York. Maybe even to finish the war and save the world.

And I’d failed.

Surely I could handle this myself. I was one of two people to ever walk alive out of a vampire prison camp. I didn’t have to roll over and call my teacher when the going got tough. With a pair of dedicated, tough knights under my command and one of the most powerful witches at my back I could handle anything Flavian and the other vampires could throw at me.

Right?

I was kidding myself if I thought I could get through this without Bill finding out about my incompetence. This way he’d at least hear it from me. I owed him that much. I picked up the phone and dialed the number for the London headquarters.

It rang four times—long enough to let me know that whoever was on the other end of the line was busy and my calling was an imposition—and a shaky, elderly voice with a posh London accent said, “How may I help you?”

“My name’s Captain Dave Carver,” I said. “I need to speak with the Pendragon.”

“
Captain
?” the woman gasped, like the title was some horrible slur. I guess she wasn’t used to directing calls from someone as comparatively low-ranked as the head of a field office. Bill was in the big leagues now.

“Just tell him my name. He’ll want to talk to me.”

“Hold please.”

The line went dead for long enough that I began to suspect that Bill’s secretary had hung up on me. I was about to follow suit and was composing what I was going to say when I got back on the phone with the uptight crank when the line clicked and a rough, Virginian voice said, “Dave? That you?”

“Pendragon, sir,” I said, my voice dripping with formality. “This is Captain Carver.”

Bill waited a beat. “Uh-huh. I know who you are, kid, and if you don’t shove that formal-talk shit down your throat, I’m gonna shove it up your ass.”

I laughed and threw him a mock salute, even though I knew he couldn’t see me. “Yes, sir.”

“I gotta tell ya, kid, it’s good to hear your voice again. I was startin’ to think you were in the wind for good and all.”

“You have May to thank,” I said. “She told me about this pathetic, weak, old man that needed my help. Wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

Bill growled into the phone. “I’ll show you an old man, you ungrateful little whelp.”

“I was gonna say a ‘doddering old fool,’ but I thought that might have been disrespectful to the office.”

He laughed. “You know, it just might have been, at that. Well whatever she had to do, it was worth it to get you out o’ that dumpy ol’ safe house and back where you belong.” His voice sobered. “So what can I do for ya, Dave? You enjoyin’ the new job?”

I filled him in on everything that had happened since I had crawled out of the safe house, including the ambush on the way to the office, Kim’s murder, and my twin meetings with Flavian. After a moment’s hesitation I decided to leave out my suspicions about Avalon. That could wait.

“Well, that’s quite a mess you got goin’ there, kid. I’ll send
Gwen
back your way with some more backup as soon as I can.”

I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. “Thank you.”

“For what, doin’ my job? Take good care of yourself, Dave. I’ll see you soon.”

I was heading back downstairs to update the troops on everything that had happened in the last couple of hours. My head was spinning, but I felt like a burden had been lifted from my shoulders. For the first time that day I felt pretty good about events. Help was on the way.

“What the hell is this?”

May’s voice, angry and...afraid, drifted out of the bullpen to greet me on the stairs. I sprinted down the stairs, leaping the last three to land in the foyer. May stood with her back to the door, near the desk that Krissy had been using, and madly waving a piece of paper. Krissy stood eye-to-eye with the older woman—to her credit, she didn’t back down. Earl James kept shoving his arms in between the two of them, trying to calm the situation down. Rob and Madison stood off to one side, warily watching the proceedings.

“Where did you get this?” May demanded. The air in the room heated up. A coffee pot in the kitchenette rattled dangerously. A (long-healed) broken bone in my leg tingled.

I took a deep breath and roared, “Enough!” I wasn’t sure I had the lung capacity for the drill sergeant thing, but I’d seen Bill shout like that in similar situations. It usually seemed to get everything under control.

The cat-fight, if that’s what this was, came to an abrupt, weirdly funny halt. Everyone turned to look at me.

“May,” I said quietly. “What’s going on?”

“I want to know who drew this.” She shoved the paper into my hands. It was the drawing that Dallas had shown us. The one of the image that he said accompanied the dreams of fire and destruction.

I shrugged. “It’s just some drawing a wizard did. It’s got something to do with a prophecy. I was gonna deal with it after we figured out what the vamps are up to.”

May shook her head. “What was the dream?”

“You know, the usual: Death, destruction, fire. Why?”

She looked at me, and there was something utterly terrified in her eyes. “Because I’ve been having dreams like that, too. And this....
thing
was in all of them.”