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  “He wouldn’t let me. When you rose and you were stronger than him, he wasn’t sure what to do. He’d made me his thrall, and every time I tried to talk about it, the words just wouldn’t come out. He’d specifically forbidden me to tell you.”

  I cursed aloud and saw another glimpse of my car. Ignoring the automotive strangeness, I grabbed the front of her jacket, the ghost leather creaking under my phantom fingers. “What the fuck good does this do me now? Did you tell me just to make yourself feel better? To drive me out of my freakin’ mind so my crazy-ass ghost can haunt the Demon Heart?”

  “He’s been afraid of you for years, Eric, too afraid to kill you, and too afraid to really do anything to me when you were around.”

  “When I was around? What about when I wasn’t around?” I yelled. “What then?”

  “I think you already know the answer to that,” she told me, resignation clear in her voice. And I guess she was right, at that.

  “I’m so glad Willie and his werewolves ate that motherfucker,” I ranted.

  “That’s why I had to tell you,” she sobbed. Marilyn tried to put her arms around me, but all the love-struck puppy had gone out of me and I pushed her away. She kept her balance, but I couldn’t look at her. “Good! Be mad at me, Eric, as angry as you want, but you have to hear this. You may think you know how devious Roger was, but he’s worse. I can’t believe I ever thought about leaving you for him! He had some kind of plan to steal your power, to become whatever it is that you are. You’re not a normal Vlad. At first Roger didn’t believe it, but all the things he did to you, they were part of a test, to convince him, to prove what you were…are.”

  I looked back at her and she wasn’t crying. The cadence of her words was increasing, trying to beat the clock. She sounded as if her time was running out, the commercial was almost over and she had to get the rest of her message out before she returned to regularly scheduled programming. “Last night, when I was tied to the chair, I heard them say that you are the rarest of the rare, a king of kings, an emperor.”

  “Emperor?” I scoffed.

  “It has something to do with why your eyes are still blue, why you never went through postmortem syndrome. She said it’s like your transformation stopped just before it was finished, and in that gray area, not alive, not dead, and yet not entirely undead, there is a lot of power to be had.” In retrospect I should have asked her who the “she” in that sentence was, but I was too caught up in thoughts of Marilyn and Roger to think very clearly.

  “Well, la de fucking dah, Marilyn.” I tossed up my hands. “What the hell good does that do me now?”

  “Because Roger had a backup plan. I don’t know what it was, but he was working with…” She clawed at her throat, eyes ablaze with terror. “Oh, God…” She coughed. “It’s coming for me…” I tried to help, but my hand passed through her shoulder.

  “Marilyn!”

  Her mouth opened wide in a silent scream, and then it grabbed her. I didn’t know what it was, at first, and then my memories of El Segundo washed over me in a wave. I’d never been on fire so many times in one weekend. El Segundo was where I’d met Talbot, and where I’d met my first demon. Being in the presence of a demon had never bothered me when I’d been a vampire. Now that I was a ghost, its presence burned.

  Fear ripped through me, tore at my ectoplasmic brain with tiny meat hooks. A swirling cloud of Marilyn screeched through the air toward its open mouth, her ghostly essence both compressed and stretched, converting her into an unrecognizable blue smoke funnel—a hellish I Dream of Jeannie moment. But this was a demon, not a bottle, and that was Marilyn, not Barbara Eden. Where Marilyn had seemed clear and precise to my spirit eyes, the demon was an outline, a hole of blackness in the air. Marilyn, what was left of her, vanished into that void.

  The presence turned its attention to me. “Do I know you, revenant?” it asked.

  “Give her back!” I charged the demon, certain that I might get sucked into the same vortex, but not giving a damn. Fighting is one thing I’m never afraid of. My hands passed through the creature with no effect. Ghosts can’t harm demons, I guessed.

  The demon let loose with a series of loud whinnies combined with the sound of a machine crushing ice. It could have been laughter. “Her soul was promised to me, angry one. It is my due for services rendered.”

  “Let her go.”

  “I have a contract.” The demon moved closer. Supernatural panic forced me to my knees like a two-ton bouncer. The power rolled over me, tried to pound me down onto my face, but I refused to go all the way down. A Mustang’s engine roared to life somewhere far away. Beneath me frost formed on the asphalt.

  Cops and firefighters screamed. I don’t know if they saw me or the demon, but most of them ran. One of them was too close. His life called to me, not like blood, but warmth. The ground rushed up to meet him as his soul tore free and surged into me. The frost on the ground spiraled out from my phantom knees, crusting thickly on the man-made surface.

  “Give her back!” Nourished by the firefighter’s soul, I forced myself to my feet. His spirit coursed through me, the sensation not unlike the feeling of warmth and fullness I got when, as a vampire, I’d made a fresh kill. Powers, I thought to myself. If I’m a ghost, then I have ghost powers, like freezing the window, breaking it. But will any of them kill a demon?

  “An arrangement might be reached,” the demon purred. He sounded mildly impressed. If he was giving in, willing to deal, then it was likely I could hurt him. I just needed to figure out how. “An exchange,” the demon continued. “You for her?”

  “An old friend of mine warned me about deals like that,” I growled. “He said that demons always cheat.”

  “No prevarication has ever taken place on my part, I assure you, but I do obey the letter of the agreement. It is true that many do not”—he paused—“think through contracts as carefully as they should.

  “Marilyn made her deal. The agreement was reached under compulsion from her vampiric master, but the signature is hers. Her soul in exchange for an…intercession.” The demon moved back, its edges bleeding into its surroundings. “I believe I have a viable substitute, however, and will be able to perform the ritual without using up Ms. Robinson’s soul. I’ll hang onto her for now, shall I? I hope we meet again, angry ghost. But having collected this lady’s soul, I now have other duties to perform, including the intercession of which I spoke.”

  I lunged for him again, but when I crossed the white line in the middle of the road, I flew apart, my essence bursting into countless little particles of self, the world blurring even more than before. Everything went silent, then dark, until I re-formed, standing in the spot where the bomb had gone off. Nice! Not only was I a ghost, I was a ghost with a short leash.

  2

  TABITHA: WATCHING IT HAPPEN

  I was half a mile from the Highland Towers, suitcase in hand, when I heard the explosion. Two seconds later I felt Eric burning. He’s my sire, the one who made me immortal. He was also the man I’d just dumped. When I walked away from him, I had expected him to chase me, but he hadn’t, not yet, and now I didn’t know if he’d ever have the chance. I’d walked out on him in the middle of a crisis, one I’d thought he could handle.

  I was wrong.

  Eric’s scream cut through my head; the scent of charred flesh and smoke hit me hard, dropping me to my knees on the sidewalk. The suitcase fell from my hands and my scream matched Eric’s. We shouted, not in pain, but in anguish. We shouted a name. It wasn’t mine. It was hers. “Marilyn!”

  Other vampires screamed the same name. A flash of contact linked us all for a single heartbeat and I saw them—Eric’s other ex-girlfriends, the vampires he’d made and discarded, even Greta, his pretend daughter. The connection wavered, and my viewpoint withdrew, arcing up and back from the wrecked remains of the Demon Heart.

  Nearby, I thought I saw my sister’s face looking out of the doorway of the Pollux, but it wasn’t her; it couldn’t be. Rachel w
as dead. It had to be the witch, the one who looked like my sister. A small gold padlock hung from a choker around her neck, glittering in the firelight. She wore the same tight black hip-huggers and midriff top she’d been wearing when I ran into her at the Demon Heart, when she’d been with Roger. The red and blond highlights in her hair echoed the colors in the flames. She smirked and walked back inside the Pollux, removing a jade bracelet from her left wrist as she went, and the vision faded.

  My sense of Eric was gone. He was dead. I closed my eyes and blinked back bloody tears.

  “Damn it!” My voice was swallowed up by the empty street. Cars passed in the night. In Void City, you don’t stop to check on people. You mind your own business, even if the damsel in distress is wearing a low-cut blue dress and filling it well. I can still go to Phillip, I told myself. He’ll know what to do.

  I didn’t hear the car stop, but when the car door opened, the music snapped me out of it. Rob Zombie’s voice rang out, singing strains of the chorus to “Living Dead Girl,” and I laughed. When Rachel had died, I’d gorged on chocolate, but that option was lost to me now. The heartbeats of the men in the car hammered in my ears. I was angry, lost—my whole unlife plan had revolved around Eric, making him love me—no, making him realize that he loved me—and it was all gone. Ruined.

  “Hey, lady. You okay?” Alcohol-tainted breath singed my nostrils even from ten feet away. I stood up, and there were catcalls. Four men, three in the car, and one on the sidewalk. The car smelled of blood and sweat and fear. A metallic tang mixed with gunpowder and I knew that at least one of them had a gun.

  “We don’t have time for this,” the blond in the backseat muttered under his breath. A wedge of blond bangs hung down over his right eye. “We have what Mistress wants.”

  “Fuck you,” snarled the driver. “We made a big score tonight. Might as well celebrate.”

  “Look at the tits on that bitch,” whispered the other man in the backseat, next to the blond. “Are we going to—?”

  “She’s a vampire, you idiots,” the blond muttered even more quietly, anger glinting in his eyes. “And she’s a Queen, at that.”

  The man on the sidewalk wore a Void City Howlers jersey and jeans. He wiped his nose with one hand and stared at me with bloodshot eyes. “You need a ride, lady? We can give you one.” He looked back at the car and stifled a laugh. “We can all bunch up.”

  “Do you have a gun?” I asked.

  “Maybe.” Mr. Bloodshot Eyes went still and serious.

  “Want to get it out?”

  He took a step back toward the car, as if he subconsciously sensed the danger. I came forward, stepping under the streetlight. When he saw the blood running from my eyes, the tears of a vampire, he took a breath. “Shit.”

  The blond stepped out of the car, gun drawn from a shoulder holster under his jacket. He aimed it at the driver. “Pop the trunk.”

  “What the hell are you doing, Esteban?” Esteban was gorgeous. He wore black slacks, a white dress shirt with an open collar, and a black suit coat. The way he moved made it clear he was used to custom-made suits. Esteban pulled the trigger without blinking, firing through the open window. The driver’s brains exploded across the steering wheel.

  Mr. Bloodshot Eyes spun on Esteban, drawing a gun from the back of his pants. It snagged in his jersey and I charged him. Vampire speed is one of the best parts of being undead. My fingernails extended into claws, a vague stinging in my fingertips as they grew. I flayed open Mr. Bloodshot’s back and ran my tongue along the wound as he screamed. He fired the pistol in his hand reflexively and I sank my fangs into his throat, the brief painful tearing as my fangs pierced my gums completely erased by the sudden infusion of warm fresh blood in my mouth.

  “Holy shit!” the man in the backseat screamed. He had olive skin and wore a ratty T-shirt. “Holy shit!” He glanced back and forth between me and Esteban as if he didn’t know who to run from. There was a switchblade in his hand. Esteban rolled his eyes. I bent Mr. Bloodshot’s neck at an angle so I could watch them both without taking my mouth from his throat.

  “Esteban, what the hell are you doing, man?” None of the four men looked older than midtwenties, but the last one in the car looked youngest of all. “We went to school together, man.”

  “That’s why I didn’t kill you.” Esteban opened the driver’s-side door, reaching down to pop the trunk.

  A yellow pickup passed by us in the other lane; the wind from its passing ruffled Esteban’s hair and the headlights illuminated his dark-blue eyes. Another car swung wide around the stopped car, edging into the other lane.

  Esteban reached into the trunk and pulled out a heavy leather satchel, then dropped it on the asphalt. It sounded like the bag was filled with chains or links of metal, but the sides of the bag squirmed as if the contents were alive. I dropped my snack’s cooling corpse to the ground.

  “What’s in the bag?”

  “The Infernal Chains of Sarno Rayus, Majesty.” Esteban swapped the gun to his left hand. He slipped his right arm out of the suit coat, letting it hang loose as he swapped gun hands again before ripping the sleeve of his shirt at the seam to show me a rose tattoo. “I am Esteban, thrall to Lady Gabriella. I offer you my apology for interrupting your evening, the life of my companion, the vehicle, and its contents, excepting only the chains for which I was sent. In exchange, I ask only your leave to depart this area and deliver to my mistress that which she has requested.”

  Hunger gone, my fangs and claws retracted. I looked at the vehicle, the dead driver, and I didn’t want anything to do with it or the would-be rapist inside. It wasn’t that he’d done or said anything overtly threatening, but his scent, a mixture of arousal and aggression, gave him away.

  “He was going to…” I hadn’t even gotten all the words out when Esteban shot the man with the switchblade, the bullet shattering the rear window of the car. Esteban holstered his gun and slid his arm back into the jacket.

  “Shit!” I blinked. “You went to school with that guy.”

  Esteban nodded. “And then his presence offended you, Highness.”

  “What are you again?”

  “Thrall to the Lady Gabriella.” He bowed once, looking up at me with a movie star’s smile before he straightened. “May I have permission to approach?”

  “Sure.”

  His eyes never left mine as he walked across the concrete. It was reassuring, and I realized that it was meant to be. Eye contact was all I needed to assault his mind and he knew it. Esteban bit his lip.

  “Your makeup is running,” he said, touching the blood on my cheek. He drew a small plastic pack of wet wipes out of his jacket pocket. “May I?”

  “Yeah…”

  Tenderly, as if I were a sacred object, Esteban wiped away my bloody tears. Using a second wipe, he cleaned the blood spatter from my chin, neck, the swell of my breast…all the while watching me closely for the slightest sign of displeasure.

  “That’s better.” Esteban carefully folded the used wipes and put them in his pocket. “I do hope you won’t hold any ill will toward Lady Gabriella?”

  “No,” I whispered.

  “Then, if I may?” He gestured to the car and I nodded.

  “Just make sure Gabriella takes care of any Fang Fees,” I added belatedly. Fang Fees are the vampires’ equivalent of parking tickets, but much more expensive. If the VCPD has to cover something up, they find out which supernatural citizen did the deed and submit a bill. Since I hadn’t been a vampire for long, I’d yet to be billed for one, and I didn’t want to start now.

  “Of course.”

  I picked up my suitcase and looked past Esteban at the people he and I had slaughtered, then walked away, trying to ignore the nausea rising in my stomach. They weren’t real people, I repeated in my head, they were just food. Just food. I almost believed myself.

  In the distance I heard sirens. Half a block away I watched Esteban light a cigarette, the flash of the lighter revealing a mischievous smi
rk. Then he walked back to the car and shut the trunk. Seeing him there, standing amongst the bodies as if they weren’t bothersome at all, he reminded me of Eric.

  “Eric…” His name felt good on my lips, but the thought of him brought warmth to my eyes and the tears started again. Most vampires cry blood, but now that I’d fed, there was no blood in my tears, just water, saline…whatever tears are made of. That’s part of my gift. Unlike all the other vampires I know, I can seem to be human; I can cry, breathe, and even eat. I haven’t managed to actually taste anything yet, which makes the actual eating less cool, but I’m working on it.

  Talbot tells me that it’s not really life, but it feels real enough to me. When I turn it on full blast, I even show up in mirrors. It damps my other vampiric abilities—a lot—but it’s worth it to be able to do my own makeup. I couldn’t help but think how impressed Eric would have been if I’d simply shown him. Eric, what am I going to do without you?

  3

  ERIC: BETTER OFF DEAD

  The Demon Heart was a lonely place to be. It wasn’t completely gone. During the fire, I’d been sure there’d be nothing left, but the central runway, though charred and smoking, still stood. Part of the bar lay on its side across the front sidewalk. I stared down at the twisted remains of the break room refrigerator, watching the mass of melted plasma bags mix with the blood that had once been contained therein. Decades of blood, breasts, and bad art design were gone. The surprise? I didn’t really miss it. I couldn’t bear looking at it, either, though, so I spent a lot of time watching the Pollux across the street, waiting for the cavalry.

  Greta was still out at Orchard Lake, and it was unlikely that she could get back here until morning. Talbot would come waltzing back eventually. He always does. I thought of Tabitha. No…Tabitha wouldn’t come back to me on her own. If I wanted her, I’d have to chase her. I still wasn’t certain if I wanted to do that. Most of the time folks I care about are better off far away from me. I offer my recently blown up and soulnapped former fiancée as Exhibit Ow. Which left me with Rachel, my thrall….