Destiny's Child (Kitsune series Book 3) (27 page)

“Which town?  There are several in the area.”

“
Longview, just off the highway.”

“Okay, I kinda know where that is.  Is her vamp going to be there?”

“Elektra says no.  She’s meeting us an hour before sunset so we won’t have to worry about it being a trap or something.”

“Doesn’t mean the vamp won’t have more of his thralls in the area, keeping an eye on his main squeeze.”

“Maddy thought of that, too.  That’s why we’re going in heavily armed, and you’re staying close, on the ghost side of things as an ace up our sleeves.”

I grinned.  “Good plan.  I like it.  Let’s go.”

Fran bounced off the couch, leaving her books and notebook beside the remote control.  She snatched up a black satchel that had a silver cross riveted on the side, the tools of her trade I assumed.  She threw on a matching leather duster that had been draped over a chair, and finished up by flipping her raven hair back to clear the collar. 

She gestured to a quilted, black coat lying on the back of the couch.  “Maddy brought that for you.  It has Kevlar lining.”

But no slits for my wings.  They’ll get squished, but that’s a necessary evil.
 

I put the coat on slowly and noticed something new:
on my left and right, top and bottom wings were hooked together to move as a unit.  Flexibly, they folded and fattened along my ribs, the tips just reaching to my abs.  I wouldn’t have to wear damaged clothing to accommodate my wings anymore. 

I closed the coat.  The fit was perfect
.
  “How thoughtful.”  Unintended, that sounded insincerely snarky, so I added, “Really, I’ll have to thank her.”

Fran marched to the hall door and opened it, going through.  I stayed a step behind as we went to the next door, entering this wing
of the school’s main hall.  It took us past Van Helsing’s office.

“We telling him anything?” I asked.

“That’s Maddy’s call.  Me?  I prefer to ask forgiveness later, rather than get permission ahead of time.  After all, he might say no.”

At the next corner we discovered Faith.  She was in black slayer leather pants and top, a bandoleer of white cedar stakes crisscrossing her torso under a longcoat.  She wore a spiked collar to protect her throat, and knee pads with silver spikes jutting out a few inches.  Her calf-high boots were steel-toed and had silver spurs in back.  Fingerless gloves completed her fashion ensemble.  Her white eyes latched onto me as if she could see.

“You weren’t going into action without me, were you?”

Fran frowned, but said nothing about the addition to our forces. 

“Glad to have you,” I said.

Fran led us on to the garage.  We found Maddy waiting behind the wheel of one of the big white vans.  She was gunning the engine impatiently.  That wasn’t the cool warrior I knew.  Then again, mothers have a way of putting us on edge and keeping us there.  We climbed in the van, settled, and strapped in.  Maddy said nothing about Faith coming along, only nodding a greeting Faith couldn’t have seen.

Maddy used a remote device and the garage door opened behind us.  We backed out and took the loop that sent us barreling downhill toward the front gates, the mulch-covered garlic beds to either side.  Beside me, Faith wrinkled her nose.  I felt like doing the same.  My heightened sense of smell made life torture sometimes.  Still, stink was better than vamps.  If we were very lucky, we’d get back tonight without having met any of them—not that I really believed that.  My luck had always been abominable.

*   *   *

In the middle of a gravel yard, we reached a big pile where several buildings looked like they’d been fused together by happenstance more than human design.  They were white clapboard, in need of fresh paint.  The one-story, left section was clearly a bar.  There were neon signs in the windows so you couldn’t easily look in.  The signs were red and blue, advertising several brands of beer.  Three steps led up to the front double doors.  No bouncer was in evidence. 

The middle section was a hole-in-the-wall advertised itself as Vic’s Home-style Grill. 

The left section—a big box of a structure—loomed two stories.  A big sign on the building used an old-fashioned font from early frontier days.  It said: Roadhouse Theater.  There were more steps, and playbills advertising past Community Theater productions:
Annie Get your Gun
, and
Cats
.  Deep in my spirit, I wept for the lack of culture around these parts.

We parked between some good-ol’-boy’s cherry-red pickup truck, and a black van with a dead, plastic mouse on top, feet kicking the sky.  The black van had pale blue writing on the side, a vinyl sign that said: Mick’s Extermination Service.  Fran chortled at that.  “We’re in the same business,” she said, “but our mice have wings and fangs.”

Her words summoned an image to my mind of a vampire bat.

Faith had a questioning look on her face.

I described the van to her.  She smiled.  “I get it.”

Maddy stared at the blind slayer in the rear-view mirror.  “Faith, I’d like you to stay here, and if we get over our heads, give Van Helsing a call to come bail us out.”

“You’re trying to get rid of me,” Faith said.  “Trying to protect me.”

“Sure,” Maddy said, “but that doesn’t mean I’m not giving you an important job to do.”

Faith nodded.  “Okay, but if the mission goes sideways, I’m calling for backup, then I’m coming in.”

Maddy unbuckled, and opened her door.  She spoke over her shoulder, “Since I can’t stop you, do what you like.”

Faith smiled.  “I always do.”

Faith moved forward to settle behind the wheel, in reach of the dash-mounted radio.  Fran, Maddy, and I locked the door behind us, giving Faith some small measure of security.  With the girls beside me, right and left, we headed for the bar.  “What if they card us?” I asked.

“I’ve got fake ID,” Maddy said.

“Me, too,” Fran added.

“I guess I’m odd girl out.”

“You’re not officially here, remember?  You need to go ghost while we check things out.  None of us are here for a good time.  I’m meeting my mom, after all.”

We stopped at the foot of the steps.  Fran had a hand on Maddy’s sleeve.  “Can you do her in, if you have too?  If not, I’ll—”

“I can do whatever I have too.”  Maddy’s voice was ice and iron—emotionless strength—but laid her hand over Fran’s a moment and gave her a squeeze.

“Okay,” I said, “I’m gone, but not far.”

I crossed over, pulling the weave of space over me, sliding through its fold to elsewhere.  The usual electric tingle and color shift followed as gravity dialed itself down a bit.  I looked over at some black oak that wove serpentine branches into a heavy mesh.  The low sun smoldered through that screen, a pale gray light that moments before had been coal red.  We had about an hour until sunset, maybe a little less.

Fran waved a hand.  It went right through my body, leaving a slight ripple in my orange haze aura.  From her perspective, it would seem like I’d simply vanished into thin air.  Maddy pulled her up the steps.  I let them get ahead, following a few feet behind.  They went through the double doors.  The doors swung through me as I went in.  I held in my aura to stay immaterial to the world around me.  It wasn’t so much that I’d left the old world behind, I’d simply crowded myself into a side dimension of it that few humans can perceive, a zone where ghosts and demons dwell, not that I saw any of them at the moment.  That might have made things awkward.  I had a mission.  I needed to stay focused.

Maddy and Fran nodded to a big guy on a barstool inside the door.  He barely glanced at their fake IDs, waving them along.  They were hot girls.  That alone was enough to get them in most places.  They skirted the hardwood dance floor—which was mostly empty—and took a table near the small stage used for occasional live bands.  For atmosphere, the ceiling had been paneled in sun-faded, weathered wood.  The place had a few arcade machines and a jukebox.  One wall sported a bullet-ridden, ragged flag
that might have seen action at the Alamo, a white star on a blue field—gray, now that I was seeing it from the ghost realm.

The table the girls chose was round, plain wood with a glass bowl at its center.  A stubby candle inside the bowl cast out a surprisingly strong light—yellow-orange to them, pale gray from my side of the veil.  They pulled out round-backed chairs and settled down, as a waitress approached.  There was something wrong with her aura.  It was a flat grayish-blue, all wilty at the edges, crumbly and wrinkled like damp paper.

Flat-out weird.

Her eyes turned my way, and paused.  She looked me up and down and sneered.  Her black eyes warmed red.  Another person looked out of those eyes, making them blaze unnaturally red for a moment.  She ignored me after that, taking Maddy’s and Fran’s order before sashaying away.

Only one thing explained this: the waitress was a thrall, and her vampire master had used her to look us over.  All of us.  Whatever element of surprise we hoped to have was clearly diminished.  Our best chance lay in the fact that the vamp might not really understand what I was and what I could do.  For all he knew, I was just a ghost tagging along, a bit of undead energy giving shape to a memory of life.  I could build on that.  I hoped. 

TWENTY-SEVEN

We who rock the cradle

croon a minor’s lament.

You can’t start a kid too early

on the milk of discontent

                                                        —We Who Rock the Cradle

                 
                              Elektra Blue

Now that I knew to look for damaged auras, I was picking out more thralls in the crowd.  They were acting casual, trying to blend in, and mostly watching from the corners of their eyes as they sipped at their beer.  I counted four males thrall, one of them hitting on a chick over by the mechanical bull.  Nowhere did I see Elektra Blue.  She was being fashionably late, or drawing things out so the sun would set and her vamp lover could get here.  We were going to have to really keep an eye on the clock. 

And the drinks.  I didn’t want my friends drinking anything the waitress brought them.  Speaking of which, she was heading this way with a round, plastic tray.  It looked like Maddy and Fran had both ordered sodas.  The waitress set down the drinks, left a couple paper-wrapped straws on the table, and strolled off with a suspicious smirk on her face. 

Maddy reached out and grabbed her drink.  She lifted it a few inches.  I put my hand over her wrist and bled aura through my touch so she could feel me pushing down, and I wouldn’t simply ghost through her.  Her forehead furrowed then cleared.  She put her glass back down.  She might not know why I was stopping her, but she trusted me, shaking her head at Fran when she tried to gather in her drink.  They exchanged words I couldn’t hear, and pushed their drinks even further away.

Good girls.

Since my presence was known to the bad guys, I thought I might as well join the party, but I didn’t want to simply materialize.  I hopped across the room, sailing in the lower gravity of the ghost realm, and reached the ladies room.  I ghosted through the door and found the place empty.  I
crossed back
to the human side of the veil, a tingling sweeping my skin.  Gravity tightened its hold.  My aura went invisible, and the room’s colors burst from the previous gray tones.  The walls were bubblegum pink as were the stalls.  The sinks were white porcelain and the faucets were chrome.   I resisted the urge to gag, turned, and went out the door.

Just another patron, ignore the bouncy antennae on my head
.

As I threaded the crowd, a high school jock type in a too-tight tee shirt paused in my way.  His arms and chest were beefy.  He wore a black ski cap on his head.  He blinked at my forehead, stared at his beer, then back at my antennae.  

“It’s not polite to stare.”  I snatched the cap off his head, put it on, and shoved on past him as he stood transfixed.  I pulled out a chair at our table and sat.  “Change of plans,” I said.  I told them about the waitress and the other thralls in the room.  “They know I’m here, but we still have an advantage if they don’t know I’m kitsune.”

The front door opened.  A woman came in wearing a dark blue hoodie, slashed jeans, and calf-high boots with decorative straps on the ankles.  Her hood was up and her eyes hid behind heart-shaped sunglasses.  She threw back her hood.  Her hair was short, white on the sides, a blue streak down the middle, but not styled up into her trademark Mohawk.  This was Elektra Blue incognito. 

She let the door swing shut behind her and removed her shades to better scan the gloomy interior.  Her gaze fell on Maddy.  Elektra smiled and headed over. 

I looked at Maddy and saw her hunching in tension. 

Reflexively, Fran slid a hand inside her coat.  I think she was fondling a sharp wooden stake.  I was just happy she didn’t whip it out and put it to use.