Moon River (20 page)

“
It’s very much
not
going to be okay, Samantha,” said Hanner, now facing me. “Just ask your ex-husband. Oh, and there might have been a small chance that I came across your husband at his sleazy little strip club a few months ago, and told him to call me when his little vampire problem got out of hand.”

Danny jerked his head; a small sound escaped from his bloody lips.

“There he goes again,” said Hanner, shaking her pretty head, but not taking her eyes off me, eyes that burned with an inner flame. “Calling your name like you give a damn.”

“
I do give a damn,” I said.

“
And that’s your problem, Samantha,” said Hanner. “You give too much of a damn over these humans.”

“
You’re not Hanner,” I said, stepping forward again, and this time, Fang didn’t press the knife any harder against my sister’s throat. I noted that Fang looked nothing like the man I had once known. Fang and I had never had a physical relationship, and the truth was, we hadn’t seen too much of each other outside of the bar where he’d worked, Hero’s. Still, the man—or thing—in front of me, holding a knife to my sister’s throat, looked dead and lost.

“
No,” said the female detective in front of me. She spoke in a slow, calculating, slightly lilting way, an accent I could not detect. “Hanner has taken, to use a modern idiom, a back seat. But rest assured, she’s watching with interest from the shadows where she belongs. Where all of you belong.”

“
He needs help,” I said. “Let him go. Let my sister go. You want me. I’m here.”

“
Oh, we want you all, Samantha Moon.”

I looked at Fang, and decided to address him by his real name, “Aaron,” I said. “What have you done? What have they done to you?”

“He can’t talk, Sam,” said Hanner.

I snapped my head around and looked at her. “Why the hell not?”

“He’s been compelled not to, as you might have guessed. Just as he’s being compelled to hold the knife to your sister. Just as he’s being compelled to watch you die.”

“
Compelled by whom?” I asked, but knew the answer immediately. “Dominique.”

“
But of course, Samantha Moon. Only the most powerful vampires can compel another vampire. And Aaron here, or Eli, or Fang, as he still prefers to be called, has been such a good little boy. And quite the killer, too. Truly vicious. You should see him in action. He makes Mommy so very proud.”

“
You’re sick.”

“
We’re all sick, Sam.”

“
No,” I said. “You’re different. You’re evil.”

“
We are mavericks, Samantha, nothing more, nothing less.”

“
What the hell does that mean?”

“
It means we have seen how the world works, how the Universe works, and we have decided there is a better way.”

“
What way?”

“
Our
way, Samantha Moon. But to do that, you see, we need our sister to be free. You have bottled her up, so to speak, for far too long.”

“
You want to give her a new host.”

“
Yesss,” Hanner hissed, although it was not Hanner who spoke to me. She looked over at my sister. “Yesss, and we found another, Sssamantha Moon. And she carries, of course, your bloodline.”

“
What about my bloodline?” I asked.

“
You don’t know, do you?”

“
Know what?”

“
Never mind that, Samantha. You’ll be dead soon.”

Hanner reached behind her back and pulled out an old-fashioned .38 revolver. “Not just any gun, Sam. This one happens to be equipped with silver bullets.”

I almost sprang on her, believing wrongly that I could move faster than she could pull the trigger, except she was a fairly old vampire herself, and I would be dead before I took a step.

The fire in her eyes flared brightly.

I turned my shoulders as a shot rang out. Pain blasted my shoulder as the sound of the gunshot split the air. Mary Lou screamed. Even Danny made a noise. Most interesting was the noise I heard in the next chamber, the sound of something growling and the bellow of something dying.

But that all seemed very far away from me now.

“You are fast, Samantha Moon,” said Hanner, approaching me, holding the gun out. “I’ve never known how you could anticipate another vampire. Then again, maybe it’s something in your blood. Maybe it’s something that’s in your sister’s blood, too. Something we can dig out, understand, and perhaps use.”

I stumbled away from her, holding my shoulder, as her eyes flared again. The next shot shattered my elbow and I felt my right arm drop limp. I cried out for the first time in a long time. Mostly from the burning, the unending, goddamn burning.

She stepped around me, still holding the gun before her. She was smiling, but her eyes were dead...when I saw the slight change. The deadness was replaced with something close to compassion.

“
I’m sorry, Sam,” she said, the lilt in her voice gone. “I’m sorry it had to be this way. I liked you. I really did. I thought we could be friends. I thought we could be friends forever. But you wouldn’t play by the rules. By
their
rules. Just know that I didn’t want this for you.”

She paused, and the deadness returned, replaced by the spark of fire just behind her pupils.

“Enough,” said the accented voice.

She raised the gun, aimed it at my chest, and that was the last thing she ever did in this world.

The silver tip of Fang’s knife blade appeared through her chest.

The bloodied silver tip.

Chapter Forty-five

I was all alone with Danny.

“Allison has gone for help for you,” I said. His head was on my lap as we sat together on the dirt and rock floor. My arm was messed up, but already healing. I kept it at my side. I could literally feel my bones moving, finding their way, forming and reforming.

“
Who’s Allison?” he asked. “Never mind.”

I almost smiled. Indeed, a fat lot of good it did him to learn the name of one of my friends, especially if his condition didn’t improve.

“I don’t feel so good, Sam.”

“
I know you don’t, you idiot.”

With Fang’s help, we had done our best to staunch Danny’s bleeding.

Fang...he’d been released from his compulsion the instant that Kingsley had killed the old vampire. And when I’d said killed, I meant he could have been killed many dozens of times over. The old man was now nothing but chunks of bloody meat scattered around the cavern. Kingsley had stated that the old man had finally given up, and had just stood there when Kingsley had come for him. He was now certain the old man had wanted nothing more than to finally die. Kingsley had very much given him his wish.

And thus, he’d released Fang from his compulsion.

Instantly, Fang had sprung into action to save me.

Kingsley was now wearing my sweater around his waist, which now looked more like a loincloth. Truth was, with his scratched chest and thick shoulders and wild hair, he looked more like Conan the Barbarian than Orange County’s most prominent defense attorney.

I shook my head at the absurdity of it all and returned my attention to my mortally wounded ex-husband.

“
Why did you do it, you big idiot?” I asked.

Danny coughed and as he did so, more blood appeared around his bandage and from the corners of his mouth. “I hated you, Sam. You always seemed to get the better of me.”

“I wasn’t trying to get the better of you, you big friggin’ moron.”

“
Do you mind not calling a dying man names, Sam?”

“
You’re not dying.”

“
You, better than anyone, could see that.”

He was right, of course. I could see the aura around his body had darkened considerably in the last fifteen minutes, fifteen crazy minutes during which all of us were doing our best to make sense of what had just happened.

When Allison had finally released the two hunters, they’d dashed off, leaving behind their ruined crossbows and silver-tipped bolts. She was certain they had been compelled by Hanner. For as soon as she’d died, her control over them had vanished, as well. Yes, Hanner, my-one time drinking companion, was dead. The demon within her wasn’t dead, of course. No, I had seen the black shadow pour from her dying mouth, to disappear into the ether, to one day find a new host.

Now Allison was off seeking help for Danny, and keeping in telepathic contact with me, too. At the moment, she had just made it to the parking lot, but she didn’t have cell reception there either. I had given her my keys. She was just now getting into the minivan.

“I made so many mistakes, Sam,” Danny said.

“
I know.”

He coughed. “Jesus, you didn’t have to agree so fast.”

“Well, you were a jerk and a moron and—”

“
No name calling, remember? I know I screwed up.”

“
Royally,” I said.

“
I was afraid, Sam. Afraid of you. Afraid for my life. I mean, I had no idea that such things existed.”

“
I’m not a
thing
, Danny. I was your wife. That was always your problem. You made me into a monster. I wasn’t a monster, and you know it. I was fighting it and winning, and you abandoned me, abandoned us.”

As I spoke, I couldn’t help but notice his aura had darkened some more, and a deep, rich blackness was creeping through what had once had some color.

He coughed harder than before. He kept on coughing, and as he did so, the darkness kept spreading.

“
Ah, Danny. I’m sorry this happened to you.”

“
I asked for it, Sam. And don’t you dare save me. Don’t you dare make me like you. Please.”

“
I won’t, Danny.”

He coughed harder than ever, and then lay back, wheezing. “I didn’t know what I was doing, Sam. Hanner promised me she would help me get the kids back.”

“You don’t want the kids, Danny. They would only get in the way of your new...playboy lifestyle.”

“
That’s where you’re wrong, Sam. I love them more than you know.”

His eyes closed and the darkness surrounded him completely.

“I know you love them, Danny,” I said.

He didn’t respond, of course.

My stupid idiot of an ex-husband had just died in my arms.

Chapter Forty-six

It was weeks later.

I was in my office, working, doing anything I could to get my mind off Danny’s death. We had left him in the cavern, along with the remains of the old vampire and Hanner. Kingsley had sealed the entrance with more rocks and destroyed another entrance we had found at the back of the caverns.

For all intents and purposes, the cavern had ceased to exist, and was now, in fact, a tomb, adding to its legions of dead three more lost souls.

There was no hiding Danny’s death from my kids, especially when I had a mind-reading daughter. So, I had told them what had happened. I told them that their dad had died trying to be with them, that their dad had made friends with the wrong people, and that their dad had died telling me how much he loved them, his last words, in fact.

It had been a hell of a shitty week.

Yes, I had asked my kids to keep one more whopping big secret. I asked them not to let the world know that their dad had died. Yes, I was a horrible mother, but the world at large needed to think that Danny had disappeared, perhaps with a stripper prospect, or perhaps because of some dirty business dealings. These explanations weren’t far from the truth. Hanner and Fang had disappeared months earlier, back when Fang had first turned. Hell, Fang didn’t technically exist, anyway, having been on the run since his escape from the insane asylum two decades earlier.

I had all of this on my mind in the weeks that followed, weeks during which I threw myself into my work, and threw myself into anything to avoid thinking about my lying, cheating ex-husband, my ex-husband who I suddenly missed with all my heart, my ex-husband who I forgave and would forever forgive.

Sanchez had also come by with questions of his own. I told him what I knew. I even told him about the caverns under the Los Angeles River. I told him that he had been compelled to act as a sort of puppet for Hanner.

I told him all of this, then took his hand and looked him deeply in the eyes, and then compelled him to forget it all. I told him to go home to his psycho wife and to forget anything about vampires. I told him to close his related cases and to write all three off as animal attacks. I told him I thought he was very handsome, but asked him to forget that I’d said that, too.