J.B., Gabriel and I left the Agency and headed west.
“How did you find out about this nest?” I asked J.B.
His eyes slid away from me. “I asked around.”
“Asked who?” I said suspiciously. Then it dawned on me. “You asked one of the seers to tell you about the death of a human at the hands of vampires, didn’t you? J.B., you actually broke the rules?”
Agents are allowed to know the time and place of a death, but that’s about it. We’re not allowed to know what is going to happen or why or how. I’m pretty sure it’s a measure that’s been put in place to prevent us from trying to stop deaths. Like I’ve said before, it can be difficult to stand back sometimes, to let death happen even when you know that it should.
“I had to break the rules,” J.B. said. “We’ve got to find some way to cure these people. So I hid under a veil and followed a vampire after it killed a person.”
I shook my head. “You’re getting wild in your old age, J.B. One of these days you might forget to fill out a form.”
“That will never happen,” he assured me.
“What do we do if this nest doesn’t have any vampires that are using memories?” I asked.
“It had better,” J.B. said. “I’m not asking another seer for information. I could lose my position if anyone found out.”
“How do you know this particular seer will not betray you?” Gabriel asked.
J.B. was silent, and when I looked at him I saw a faint pink tinge on his cheeks. “She, um, likes me.”
I could think of a million things to say in response to that, but I didn’t. Gabriel turned his head away so J.B. wouldn’t see him smile.
We continued west and south until we hit the Ukrainian Village area. J.B. indicated that we should land, and we touched down on the sidewalk in front of a three-flat apartment building.
The snow was piled high in drifts and the sidewalk had been imperfectly shoveled, leaving lots of icy patches. And of course I promptly slipped on one and landed on my butt in a pile of snow. Since I was still wearing the peacoat, my jeans got soaked almost immediately. Luckily no one could see me except J.B. and Gabriel. As long as my wings were out I was still invisible. J.B. was snorting with laughter. Gabriel knew better.
I stood up, dusted snow off my bottom and gave J.B. an evil glare. “I thought that all the Agents were afraid of my wrath.”
“The Agents are. I’m not,” J.B. said. “I’ve seen you come to work in your slippers.”
“Anyway,” I said, not wanting to rehash one of my least favorite moments, “is this the place?”
“Yes,” J.B. said, sobering. “I didn’t have time to do a lot of reconnaissance, so I’m not certain exactly how many of them are in there.”
“But they are all, presumably, asleep,” Gabriel said. “The sun will not go down for at least two more hours.”
“Yeah, but they could have magical defenses in place in case their home is breached,” I said. “Any smart vampire has them; otherwise their enemies could just waltz in the front door while they were sleeping.”
Vampires and goblins don’t have a protective threshold like other creatures. I’m not sure why. It probably had something to do with the concept of “home.” Humans, faeries, and a lot of other supernatural creatures made permanent homes, and a home is a lot more than a space to rest your head. It takes on the essence of the people who live there, who love and laugh and fight and make memories in that space.
Vampires don’t do that. They just…exist. As far as I can tell they pretty much eat and sleep and have sex. So in order for them to be protected during the day, they either needed magical defenses or hired humans to watch over them. The slightly run-down air of the three-flat told me that these vampires could probably not afford to hire help.
The windows were all blocked by blackout shades, so we weren’t going to get any information that way. There was nothing for it except to try to ease through the defenses and hope we didn’t set off any alarms, and I told the other two as much.
“Well, let’s try to find the defenses before we go rushing in,” J.B. said.
We all went silent, each of us drawing on our power. I’d done something like this before when I detected the presence of the portal in the alley that led to Amarantha’s kingdom. I pushed out my magic, spreading it away from me like a cloak of fine mesh, and watched it settle. There were several places where the cloak bulged, and I could see the little flares of magic set at regular intervals around the perimeter of the house.
“Do you see them?” I asked the other two.
They both nodded, frowning.
“But there’s nothing on the second floor,” I said. “Stupid.”
“We’d have to break a window to get in that way,” J.B. said.
I shrugged. “So?”
He sighed. “You’re right.”
“Wow, I never thought I’d hear those two words pass your lips,” I said.
“Let us enter from the back of the building,” Gabriel said. “A passerby may notice if one of the windows seems to be breaking open with no cause.”
We flew around to the back. I took one look at the wooden fire escapes and shook my head. “No way. They’re going to have this area covered.”
I performed the same spell again and noted that the defenses were significantly stronger back here.
“It’s the front or nothing,” I said.
We all looked at one another. Breaking a window in the front definitely increased the risk that attention might be drawn to the house. But it wasn’t as though we had a lot of choice.
Gabriel wouldn’t let me break the window. I let him do it because he was stronger than me and J.B. put together. He swung his arm back and blasted his gloved fist through the glass as if it were water.
The glass made an awful noise, and we all froze except for the slightest flapping of our wings. No one was walking down the street at the moment, so it was unlikely there were any witnesses.
Gabriel cleared the frame of the remaining shards so that we could climb in safely. He swung his leg over the sill and pushed the blackout shade to one side.
There was an inhuman hiss from inside the room and the blackout shade dropped back into place as Gabriel let go.
“Gabriel!” I whispered fiercely.
“It is all right,” he said calmly through the shade. “The vampire that occupies this room is still asleep. His unconscious was simply responding to the touch of sunlight.”
He lifted the shade on the opposite side so that we could climb in without disturbing the vampire further. Although the daylight was not their natural time, a vampire could certainly rouse itself if it felt threatened in sleep. We didn’t want to antagonize the vampires any more than necessary.
J.B. climbed in and I followed, wrinkling my nose. The room smelled like decaying corpses. A single male vampire lay stretched out on a filthy bed splashed with blood. In the corner was a pile of rotting limbs and human skulls. My blood ran cold. Some of those bones were very small.
I covered my mouth and nose with my sleeve. “I thought most vampires don’t kill their food.”
“They don’t,” J.B. said thoughtfully. “But this is the vampire I followed home from the kill, so obviously he’s gotten a taste for it.”
“We should stake him,” I said fiercely. “He’s a serial killer.”
“That’s not what we’re here for,” J.B. said. “Look around for a headset.”
“It’s not going to be in this room,” I muttered angrily. “This asshole gets his memory high the natural way.”
As I predicted, there was no equipment in this particular vamp’s room.
We entered the hallway stealthily, still on the lookout for any humans that might be living in the building. We didn’t find any. We did find more sleeping vampires, although none of their rooms looked like the charnel house of the first one. Most of the vamps’ rooms looked like ordinary twentysomething bedrooms, with posters on the walls and clothes all over the floor. We split up to make the search go faster. There were a lot of vampires living here.
Finally, in the seventh room, I found it. It did look like a VR headset from that movie where Russell Crowe is
