The Good, the Bad, and the Undead

Piscary's daytime quarters were not what I had expected. I walked out of the elevator, my head swinging from side to side, taking it all in. The ceilings were high - I guessed ten feet - and were painted white where they weren't covered with warm, primary-colored sheets of fabric draped into soothing folds. Large archways hinted at equally spacious rooms farther in. It had the soft comfort of a playboy mansion mixed with the air of a museum. I spared a moment to try to find a ley line, not surprised to find I was too deep underground.

My boots trod upon a plush off-white carpet. The furniture was tasteful, and there was occasional artwork under spotlights. Floor-to-ceiling curtains at regular intervals gave the illusion of windows behind them. Bookshelves behind glass were between them, every tome looking older than the Turn. Nick would have loved it, and I spared a thought, desperately hoping he had found my note. The first hints of possible success made me walk with more confidence than I deserved. Between Kisten's vial and Nick's note, maybe I could escape with my life.

The doors to the elevator shut. I turned, noticing there was no button to push to make them open up again. The stairway, too, was missing. It must come out somewhere else. My heart gave a pound and settled. Escape with my life? Maybe.

"Take off your boots," Kist said.

I cocked my head in disbelief. "Excuse me?"

"They're dirty." His attention was on my feet. He was still flushed. "Take them off."

I looked at the expanse of white carpet. He wanted me to kill Piscary, and he was worried about my boots on the carpet? Grimacing, I slipped them off and left them askew by the elevator. I did not believe this. I was going to die in my bare feet.

But the carpet felt nice on my arches as I followed Kisten, forcing myself to not feel the outside of my bag for the vial he had promised was there. He was tense again, his jaw tight and his manner sullen, far from the domineering vampire that had driven me to the brink of capitulation. He looked jealous and wronged. Just what I would expect from a betrayed lover.

Give me this.... echoed in my memory, pulling an un-stoppable shudder through me. I wondered if he begged Piscary like that, knowing that he had been asking for blood. And I wondered if, to Kisten, the taking of blood was a casual commitment or something more.

The sound of muted traffic drew my attention from the picture of what looked like Piscary and Lindburgh sharing a pint in a British pub. Steps slow to hid his limp, Kisten led me into a sunken living room. At the end of it was a tiled breakfast nook before what looked like, for all the world, a window overlooking the river from the second story. Piscary was lounging at a small metal-weave table dead center of the circular tiled space, surrounded by carpet. I knew I was underground and that it was only a live video feed, but it sure looked like a window to me.

The sky was brightening with the coming dawn, giving the gray river a soft sheen. Cincinnati's taller buildings were dark silhouettes against the lighter sky. Smoke came from the paddleboats as they stoked their boilers, readying themselves for the first wave of tourists. Sunday traffic was light, and the individual whooshes of cars were lost behind the thousands of clatters, clanks, and unseen calls that make up the background of a city. I watched the water ripple under the breeze, and my hair lifted in a gust in time with a soft hush of wind. Taken aback at the detail, I searched the ceiling and floor until I found a vent. A horn blew in the distance.

"Enjoy yourself, Kist?" Piscary said, pulling my attention away from the jogger and his dog running the footpath beside the river.

Kist's neck went red and he ducked his head. "I wanted to know what Ivy was talking about," he mumbled, looking like a child caught kissing the neighbor girl.

Piscary smiled. "Exciting, isn't it? Leaving her unbound like that is loads of fun until she tries to kill you. But then, that's where the thrill comes from, yes?"

My tension flowed back. Piscary looked relaxed, sitting at one of the table's two wireweave chairs in a lightweight, midnight-blue silk robe. The morning paper sat folded by his hand. The deep color of his robe went nicely with his amber skin. His bare feet were visible through the table. They were long and skinny, the same honey hue as his bare scalp. My anxiety strengthened at his bedroom-casual appearance. Great. This is just what I needed.

"Nice window," I said, thinking it was better than Trent's, the toad. He could have taken care of all of this had he acted when I told him Piscary was the murderer. Men were all alike: take what they can get without paying for it, lie about the rest.

Piscary shifted in his chair, and his robe parted to show his knee. I quickly looked away. "Thank you," he said. "I hated sunrises when I was alive. Now it's my favorite part of the day." I sneered, and he gestured to the table. "Would you like a cup of coffee?"

"Coffee?" I said. "I would have thought it was against the gangster code to have coffee with someone before killing them."

His thin black eyebrows rose. I realized he must want something from me, otherwise he would have just sent Algaliarept to kill me on the bus.

"Black," I said. "No sugar."

Piscary gave Kisten a directive nod, and he slipped soundlessly away. I pulled out the second chair across from Piscary, flopping down with my bag on my lap. I glanced out the fake window in the silence. "I like your lair," I said sarcastically.

Piscary raised one eyebrow. I wished I could do that. Too late to learn how now. "It was originally part of the underground railroad," he said. "A foul hole in the ground under someone's shipping dock. Ironic, isn't it?" I said nothing, and he added, "This used to be the gateway to the free world. It still is, occasionally. There's nothing like death to free a person."

A small sigh slipped from me, and I turned to the window, wondering how much wise-old-man-crap he was going to make me listen to before killing me. Piscary cleared his throat, and I looked back. A wisp of black hair showed behind the V of his robe, and his calves visible through the wire mesh of the table were hard with muscle. I recalled my lust rising hot and fast in the elevator with Kisten, knowing it had mostly been vamp pheromones. Liar. That Piscary could to that to me and more with nothing more than a sound turned my stomach.

Unable to stop myself, I sent my hand over my neck as if to brush my hair from my eyes. I wanted to hide my scar, though Piscary was probably more aware of it than the nose on my face. "You didn't have to rape her to get me to come see you," I said, deciding to be angry instead of afraid. "A dead horse head in my bed would have done it."

"I wanted to," he said, his low voice carrying the strength of the wind. "Much as you'd like to think otherwise, this isn't all about you, Rachel. Some of it, but not all."

"My name is Ms. Morgan."

He acknowledged this with a three-second, mocking silence. "I have been spoiling Ivy. People are beginning to talk. It was time to bring her back into the fold. And it was a pleasure - for both of us." A smile of remembrance came over him, a glint of fang and a soft, almost subliminal, guttural sigh. "She surprised me, going far past my intended purpose. I haven't lost control like that for at least three hundred years."

My stomach quivered as a surge of his vamp-induced desire flashed through me and was gone. Its potency took my breath away, and I found myself reaching out to catch it. "Bastard," I said, wide-eyed as my blood pounded in me.

"Flatterer," he said back, his eyebrows high.

"She changed her mind," I said, as the last of his need died in me. "She doesn't want to be your scion. Leave her alone."

"It's too late. And she does want it. I put no compulsion on her when she made her decision. I didn't need to. She had been bred and raised for the position, and when she dies, she will have the complexity to be a suitable companion, varied and sophisticated enough in her thoughts so that I don't become bored with her and she with me. You see, Rachel, it's not honest to say that the lack of blood is what causes a vampire to go insane and walk out into the sun. It's the boredom that brings upon a lack of appetite that leads to insanity. Working to bring Ivy about has helped me stave that off. Now that she is poised upon her potential, she's going to keep me from going insane." He inclined his head graciously. "And I'll do the same for her."

His attention went over my shoulder, and the hair on the back of my neck pricked. It was Kisten. The whisper of his passage brushed against me, and I stifled a shudder. The bruised and beaten vamp silently set a cup of coffee on a saucer before me and left. He never met my eyes, his manner holding a subdued pain. The steam from the porcelain rose three inches before the artificial wind caught it and blew it away. I didn't reach for the cup. Fatigue pulled at me and adrenaline made me feel ill. I thought of the charms in my bag. Why was Piscary waiting?

"Kist?" the undead vampire said softly, and Kisten turned. "Give it to me."

Piscary held out his hand, and Kisten dropped a crumpled paper in his palm. My face went slack in panic. It was my note to Nick.

"Did she call anyone?" Piscary asked Kist, and the young vampire ducked his head.

"She called the FIB. They hung up on her."

Shocked, I looked at Kisten. He had watched the entire thing. He had hidden in the shadows while I held Ivy's hair as she vomited, watched as I made her cocoa, and listened as I sat beside Ivy while she relived her nightmare. While I had been taking forever on the bus, Kisten had ripped my salvation from the door. No one was coming. No one at all.

Not meeting my eyes, he walked away. There was the distant sound of a door closing. My gaze flicked to Piscary's and my breath froze. His eyes were entirely black. Shit.

The unblinking obsidian orbs made my palms sweat. With the coiled tension of a predator, he reclined before me in his midnight-blue robe with that fake wind moving the wisps of hair on his bare arms, tan and healthy looking. The hem of his robe shifted with his subtle movements. His chest moved as he breathed in an effort to ease my subconscious. And as I sat before him, the enormity of what was going to happen fell on me.

My breath came and went, and I held it. Seeing me recognize my death, he blinked slowly and smiled with a knowing glint. Not yet, but soon. When he could wait no longer.

"It's amusing you care for her so deeply," he said, the power seeping from his voice to clench about my heart. "She betrayed you so utterly. My beautiful, dangerous filiola custos. I sent her to watch you four years ago, and she joined the I.S. I bought a church and told her to move into it; she did. I asked her to put in a witch's kitchen and stock it with appropriate books; she went beyond to arrange for a garden that would be irresistible."

My face was cold and my legs trembled. Her friendship had been a lie? A sham to keep tabs on me? I couldn't believe it. Remembering the lost sound of her voice as she asked me to keep the sun from killing her, I couldn't believe her friendship had been a lie.

"I told her to follow you when you quit," Piscary said, the blackness in his eyes taking on the tension of a remembered passion. "It was our first argument, and I thought that I had found the point where I could make her my scion, where she would show her strength and prove she could hold her own against me. But she capitulated. For a time I thought I might have made a mistake and she lacked the strength of will to survive infinity with me and I'd have to wait yet another generation and try with a daughter born of her and Kisten. I was so disappointed. Imagine my delight when I realized she had her own agenda and was using me."

He smiled, the slip of teeth a little bigger, showing a little longer. "She had fastened upon you as her way out of the future I saw for her. She thought you could find a way to keep her from losing her soul when she dies." He shook his head in a controlled motion, the light glinting across his smooth scalp. "Can't be done, but she won't believe."

I swallowed, making fists as my feelings of betrayal faltered. She had been using him, not following his direction. "Does she know you murdered those witches?" I whispered, sick at heart that she might have known and never told me.

"No," Piscary said. "I'm sure she suspects, but my interest in you stems from an older reason, having nothing to do with Kalamack's current holy grail of a ley line witch."

I kept my eyes from my hands gripped tightly in my lap above the opening of my bag. I couldn't reach for the vial. If it wasn't for that, why did Piscary want me dead?

"It must have cost her pride dearly to come to me, begging for clemency when you survived your demon attack. She was so upset. It's hard to be young. I understood more than she knows what it is to want an equal. And I was inclined to spoil her more once I realized she had used me without my knowing. So I let you live, provided she break her fast and take you completely. You being her shadow had an ironic twist I liked. She promised she would, but I knew she was lying. Even so, I didn't mind as long as she kept you and Kalamack apart."

"But I'm not a ley line witch," I said, keeping my voice soft so it wouldn't shake. I could have breathed the words and he would have heard. "Why?"

He hadn't taken a breath since he stopped talking. The balls of his feet were pressed to the floor. His calves were tense. Almost, I thought, moving my fingers to the opening of my bag. He was almost ready. What was he waiting for?

"You are your father's daughter," he said, the skin around his eyes tightening. "Trent is his father's son. Apart you are annoying. Together ...you have the potential to be a problem."

My gaze went distant then sharpened as I met his eyes, knowing my face had taken on a horrified expression. The picture of my father and Trent's outside a yellow camp bus. Piscary had killed them. It had been Piscary.

Hard and strong, my blood pounded in my temples. My body demanded I do something, but I sat, knowing if I moved, he would move.

He shrugged, a calculated motion that pulled my eyes to a flash of amber skin beneath his robe. "They were getting too close to solving the elven riddle," he said, watching my reaction.

I kept my face impassive as he said Trent's most precious secret, telling him I, too, knew. Apparently it was the right thing to do.

"I'm not going to let you two pick up where they left off," he added, prodding.

I said nothing, stomach roiling. Piscary had killed them. Trent's father and my dad had been friends. They had been working together. They had been working together against Piscary.

Piscary went very still. "Has he sent you into the everafter yet?"

My gaze shot to his, fear in my gut. There it was. The question he wanted answered, the one he hid among others so I wouldn't know. As soon as I answered it, I'd be dead.

"I'm not in the habit of breaking my client confidentiality," I said, my mouth dry.

His cool dispassion cracked as he took a breath. It was subtle, but there it was. "He has. Did you find one?" he asked, catching himself before he could lean forward over the table. "Was it sound enough to read?"

One? Read what? I said nothing, desperately wanting to hide my pulse pounding in my neck, but though his eyes were black, he wasn't interested in my blood. That was almost too frightening to believe. I didn't know how to answer. Would yes save my life or damn it?

Frowning, he studied me a long moment while I listened to my heart pound and sweat broke out on my arms. "I can't interpret your silence," he said, seeming irritated.

I took a breath.

Piscary moved.

The adrenaline hurt. I pushed myself from the table in a blind panic. My chair tipped over backward, with me still in it.

Piscary flung the table out of the way. It crashed aside, my untouched coffee making a fantastic pattern on the white carpet.

I scrabbled backward, my bare feet squeaking against the circle of tile. My fingers found the carpet and I clutched at it, rolling over and pulling myself forward.

A shriek escaped me as he yanked me up by my wrist. I clawed at him in panic. He took it all. Face dispassionate, he drew a fingernail across my right arm, follow the blue of a vein. Fire traced his nail as he opened my skin, then bliss. Silently, savagely, I fought to get free as he held me by my wrist, unmoving as a tree. My blood welled and I felt the bubble of insanity swell in me. Not again. I couldn't be ravaged by a vampire again!

He looked at my blood, then my eyes. Taking his free hand, he swiped it across my arm.

"No!" I screamed.

He let go of my wrist, and I fell to the carpet. Breath a harsh pant, I scrabbled backward. I found my feet, adrenaline pounding through me as I headed for the elevator.

Piscary jerked me back.

"You son of a bitch!" I screamed. "Leave me alone!"

He gave my head a smack to make me see stars.

I crumpled. Panting, I lay at his feet as he stood above me, an amulet in his hand. He smeared my blood across it, and it glowed red. His hand was enveloped in a red haze as he nudged my fallen chair farther onto the surrounding carpet. I pulled my head up, seeing past my hair that the pattern on the tiled floor before us made a perfect circle. The circle of blue tile around the white stone was one piece of marble. It was a summoning circle.

"God help me," I whispered, knowing what was going to happen when Piscary tossed the amulet to land dead center of the circle. I watched the ball of ever-after energy expand to form a protective bubble. My skin hummed with the power from another witch, kindled to life with my blood as Piscary prepared to call his demon.