The Wild Side: Urban Fantasy with an Erotic Edge (14 page)

The man let go of my arms, and I turned around to look at him. I don’t know what I expected. Probably one of the dark hooded forms I’d seen around the corpse. My heart pounded hard, and I thought I should run. But every movement brought a stabbing pain through my head and made me feel like I would throw up.

The man . . . wasn’t hooded, though he did wear a black leather jacket, which contrasted nicely with a lot of tied-back blond hair and the sort of features that romance cover artists would die for.

He smiled, a wry twist of his lips. “You’re perfectly safe with me.”

Said the wolf to the lamb, I thought, but was too nauseous to say. Besides, I wasn’t exactly equipped to fight for my life. For some reason it’s not something that often falls to students of classical literature to do. Frankly, I wasn’t normally even out alone this late. He looked behind me at the door and the smell vanished. “We should get away from here, though. Fast. Can you walk fast?”

I nodded, though I wasn’t sure at all I was telling the truth. But I was half afraid he would offer to carry me, if I said no.

As it was, he put his arm around my waist and half supported me, half pulled me, walking fast down Colfax Avenue, the longest, straightest street in the west, until it veered off to pierce the heart of Denver.

As might be inevitable in a road that long and at the center of a city that was a collection of neighborhoods, it changed every two or three blocks. One block—the one where the cellar had been—would be all warehouses. Two blocks later there would be bodegas and hairdressers with Spanish names. The next set would be lofts and gentrified coffee bars. I realized we’d left all those behind and entered what I thought of as “normal Colfax”—the part of town I thought of as real Denver, near the bend at Colorado College. Oh, somewhat gentrified, but not so much that it had run out the old diner at the corner of Colfax and Race, or the head shop across the street.

My companion had slowed down the last block, which was good because I really felt like I might pass out at any minute. Now he piloted me through the door of the diner, past a little vestibule. He nodded to the woman behind the cashier’s stand, and pulled me all the way to the back, to the corner booth, despite the sign over it saying it was reserved for parties of six or more.

No one stopped us, probably because the diner was half-empty. The clock on the wall said it was three o’clock and I frowned at it. The last I remembered was ten p.m.

I sat against the brown vinyl cushions, shivering a little, realizing I was wearing only a white T-shirt and jeans. Unless I’d lost months, as well as hours, it was January. Hell, I knew for a fact the snow had been about to fall, out there. What had possessed me to come out wearing summer clothes?

The blond man, still standing, pulled off his leather jacket and wrapped it around my shoulders, before sitting down across from me. With his jacket off, he looked, if possible, more intimidating. He also was wearing a T-shirt, but his bare arms had a wing tattooed on each of them. Beneath each wing, a single word: “Heaven” and “Bound.”

“Hello, Uri,” a waitress said, wiping the already clean table in the way waitresses do when ingratiating themselves with a big tipper. “What will it be tonight?”

“Coffee,” he said. “Black.” He might have been ordering naked odalisques on a bed of rose petals, the way he spoke. “And a slice of cheesecake.”

The woman looked at me. She was faded and forty—at least—with hair dyed an unlikely shade of red, and eyes underlined by far too dark a pencil. But she was looking at me as if I was the fright. Perhaps I was. The way my head hurt, I must be awfully pale.

“She’ll have tea,” Uri said, as if he’d known me all my life, and knew my drinking preferences. I opened my mouth to protest, then realized anything else was likely to make me throw up, and only added, “And sugar, please.” I’d read somewhere that hot, sweet tea was good for shock. And I thought I was in shock. Either that or very ill. And I hoped to all that was holy that I had imagined what I thought I’d seen in the cellar.

“How do you feel?” Uri asked, as the woman walked away.

“Dizzy,” I said. “Nauseous. Who—”

He slid a card to me, across the table. It was one of those cheap business cards you can buy in a big sheet and run through your laser printer when you need half a dozen cards and don’t mind the slightly serrated edge. It said “Heaven Bound” across the top, then “Uri Heaven,” in slightly smaller type. The bottom line, small enough to hide embarrassment at what it said, proclaimed “Psychic investigations.” At the very bottom of all, and in a smaller font still, was a phone number.

I picked up the card and ran my hand over the rough edge. “You’re Uri Heaven?”

“Uriel,” he said, and smiled dazzlingly. “Father liked names from the Bible.”

So what’s a boy with a nice biblical name like that, doing in a nightmare like this?

The waitress slid a cup and a plate of cheesecake in front of him, an empty cup, a bowl of various sweetener packages and a little teapot in front of me, and walked off to talk to one of the cooks at the counter. Uri took a sip of his coffee, put it down. He looked up at me, while I tried to avoid looking directly at him by ripping two packages of sugar open and dropping their contents into the cup.

But when he said, “What do you remember?” I couldn’t help looking up. His eyes were not actually black, as I’d first thought, but dark, dark blue. Where the lights on the distant ceiling shone upon them, you could sort of see a depth, like looking into a lake on an overcast day. They looked worried. Very worried.

“I saw a corpse,” I said. “And . . . and people around . . .”

He frowned. “I see. Did you know the corpse?”

“Phil,” I said. “I . . . we share an apartment, you see? I . . . I came . . . he left a note,” I said, finding my footing as I spoke. “Asking me to come to that address. At ten.” I looked at the clock again, and it was now three-fifteen, which meant it probably wasn’t a dream.

He inhaled deeply, then asked me the oddest question, “All right. Now tell me: were you wearing a jacket?”

* * *

An hour later, he accompanied me up the narrow staircase to my—and Phil’s—second floor apartment, frowning worriedly at me. “Are you sure you want to stay here?” he asked. “Not . . . not in a hotel room?”

The fact that I was a student and lived on carefully husbanded money that left no surplus for a hotel room was not something I wanted to discuss with a complete stranger. In fact, the place I would spend the night was none of this stranger’s business. Even if he had been a reasonable height—not towering over me by a good foot—and even if he hadn’t looked muscular enough to feature in magazine ads for miracle supplements. Even if he had no tattoos. Even if he didn’t wear a leather jacket. Or think he was a psychic investigator. Whatever that was.

I was starting to feel better, after the sugared tea, so it must have been mostly shock making me feel ill. And I was starting to come to my senses. I wouldn’t have let him accompany me home, if I could have helped it. But there had been no way to shake him, short of physical violence, and I wasn’t ready to do that. I’d managed to get away from him long enough to call the police from the old-fashioned phone in the hallway leading to the ladies’ room back at the diner. I’d given the police the address of the building and told them I thought there had been a death there, and also Phil’s name as the victim. If they checked—they were bound to check, right?—and found him, likely they’d come to my place and intercept us before he could do something funny like kidnap me.

But the hallway outside my apartment was empty, and the door looked locked and untouched. I took off Uri’s jacket, handed it to Uri, told him, “Thank you so much, but I think I’ll be all right now.” I opened the door, rushed in, shut it and bolted it, in the practiced movements of someone who had gotten rid of many an insistent date.

I leaned against the door, breathing hard, thinking of what he’d said. That Phil had been a blood sacrifice by a cult of vampire-raisers. They were trying, my charming—and more than likely nuttier than a fruit cake—companion had said, to raise all the people who’d died of consumption in the city a hundred years ago and more. Consumption, or as we now called it, TB, made those who died of it likely to become vampires. And there had been a lot of deaths of tuberculosis all over the Rocky Mountains before penicillin. The place was known to be beneficial to sufferers of lung ailments. But still quite a few of them died.

But why would anyone want to raise vampires? I’d asked.

He’d shrugged and told me, as if this were the sort of thing everyone knew—perhaps through reading some Psychic Investigators’ Journal that I didn’t know about—that vampires were very strong, somewhat telepathic and endowed with a sex appeal out of proportion with what they looked like or who they might have been while alive. That these people intended to use them as something between executioners and a shock army.

I checked the locks on the door and looked around. Everything looked exactly as I had left it and as it normally did on a Friday night. There was the sofa that Phil and I had bought fifth-hand at the Goodwill store, seventies chic, in a curved design covered in fake brown leather that had seen better days. It had Phil’s economics textbook open on it, with his highlighter resting on top.

Last I’d seen it, there had been a note on the sofa, too, asking me to meet him at that address on Colfax. Funny, I didn’t remember taking the note with me, but it wasn’t there. I looked around on the sofa, and checked my pockets, but it was gone. Mind you, Phil wasn’t home, but then he often wasn’t on a Friday night. If we weren’t out, he often went off with the guys to see some movie I didn’t want to see, or to a game or something. Friday was the night we often did separate stuff, since we were together the rest of the week.

And the police hadn’t called. I looked at the answering machine and there was no light blinking. Pressed the button and it said no new messages. It wasn’t just that I’d given them Phil’s name—which was listed here. But my jacket had been there as well, with my student ID in the pocket. They would have called, either to avoid going there, or after going there. And it had taken half an hour to walk home. It had to be forty-five minutes since I’d called. They’d have called by now.

Had I dreamed it all?

Had I slipped on those stairs, passed out, had concussion and imagined the rest—remembered a scene from some horror movie with Phil’s face on the corpse? By the time I had reached the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror, I was fairly sure that’s what had happened. Who Uri was and why he’d told me that entire tale was something I couldn’t imagine, but anyone who made a living as a psychic investigator was probably ready to tell more than a few fantastical tales. Perhaps he’d thought I’d pay him to do a psychic investigation or look for Phil or something. Or perhaps he believed what he said.

I glared at the mirror above the chipped harvest-green sink. I looked extremely pale, but at least my pupils—as I glared at my reflection—seemed to be the same size, which meant there was no skull fracture. The back of my head, when I felt it gingerly with my fingertips, blazed into a burst of pain.

I’d asked Uri if I’d fainted from the sight of Phil’s body or some sort of magic, but he’d shaken his head and told me, “No. They hit you on the head. You were supposed to be the . . . wake-up snack.”

I shuddered. Charming imagination, that. I swallowed two aspirin, threw cold water on my face and wondered why the heck Phil had left me a note asking to meet him it the basement of a warehouse. Probably someone had something to sell and he wanted me to look at it. Likely a desk, as he’d been looking for one. I brushed my teeth.

He’d probably gotten done before I got there. And they’d left the door unlocked, and I’d slipped and fallen down the steps in the dark. Yeah, that made sense.

I realized Uri—if that was his real name—had never turned the lights on or a flashlight or something, and let me see that basement. Probably full of old furniture someone was disposing of. And if Uri thought I believed for a moment that when he’d put his hand over my tea, he’d been blessing it, or that this had any effect in making my concussion better, he had another thing coming. Heck, if the lid of the teapot hadn’t been firmly shut, I’d have thought that he’d put something in it. Roofies or wallies, or windowees, or whatever the latest rape drug was.

But no, he was just one of those new-agey deluded souls who cleansed auras and talked about one’s past lives. And he knew where I lived. Which was just wonderful. Of course, normally I wasn’t here alone at night. And when Phil came dragging home tonight, he was going to get the talking-to of his lifetime, for having left before I arrived. And then he was going to promise me to forfeit his next two Fridays with the guys. He could bring them here for chips and TV or whatever, but I wanted company in case the delusional maniac came trolling around again to save me from vampires.

By the time I’d put on a nightshirt—actually an old, oversized T-shirt—I’d talked myself down from that, too. After all, Uri hadn’t harmed me, and he could have, when I was so out of it. He might be a nut, but he was an inoffensive one. I’d be fine. And Phil would probably laugh at it.

I wanted to go to sleep, but then I’d just wake up with Phil coming in. Normally I’d get out my laptop and play free cell, but I was too tired for that, and I didn’t think I could concentrate that well. Not with my head hurting so badly. So, I moved Phil’s textbook and sprawled on the sofa watching late-night TV. I was trying to figure out what the thing advertised as a mop that could also double as a shovel could possibly be, when I must have fallen asleep, because I woke up with someone pounding on the door.

“Yeah?”

“It’s me, babe.” Calling me babe was one Phil’s worse habits. But, hey, it could be gambling. Or instigating revolutions in small third-world countries. “I lost my key.”

I didn’t realize I’d been worried until I failed to be angry at Phil’s losing the key. He did it about twice a month. Sometimes he lost my key too. And each time, it cost us over a hundred dollars for the landlord to have the lock reconfigured. If he stopped doing that, we could afford cable and I might have something to watch other than late-night commercials.