Death's Mistress

“Sorry,” I mumbled, as I recognized the startled black eyes of my waiter. He thrust some bills into my hands and fled.

The distraction had been brief, but that’s all it takes when chasing someone who can move like the wind. I ran across the street and into the alley, and found what I’d expected. The full moon hung low and fat and orange in the sky, glowing like a lantern through the crack between buildings. It lit up four- and five-story brick structures, garbage, and the ribbon of water down the center of the passageway. And nothing else.

Damn it!

I forged ahead anyway, pausing every few yards to sniff the air. I hadn’t managed to get a whiff of him, but it didn’t matter. That particular scent was already cemented in my brain. But all I smelled were dog droppings, gasoline and garbage, the latter redolent of the reek of rotting fish. That was probably because there was a fish market at the end of the alley, its bright electric lights piercing the dark like a beacon.

The vamp had come that way. I finally caught him on the air, a thin thread of scent interwoven with the cleaner the proprietors used, the chlorine in the water and the smell of fresher sea life. But he was nowhere in sight.

But someone else was.

I stepped back into shadow as a tall figure in a black coat and hood came down the alley. New York in August does not require outerwear unless you’re hiding something. In my case, that something was weapons. I didn’t think that was the reason here.

The asphalt under the coat was splashed with a delicate white light. The person wearing it was outlined by a narrow halo as well, as if the coat’s fibers weren’t thick enough to contain the radiance within. It probably hadn’t been obvious on a street washed with light and color of its own, but in the gloom of the alley, it glowed.

I felt Frick and Frack come up to bracket me on either side. “Fey,” one of them said u

A dark shape flickered into view up ahead, under a streetlight, then passed out of view around a corner. The vampire emerged from the night to follow, and the fey ghosted behind him. With us bringing up the rear, it was like a small parade. It would have been fu

“Can you distract him?” I asked Frick.

“We have no orders to engage the fey.”

“I’m not asking you to engage him, just to distract him. Make sure he loses his target.” They didn’t bother to respond, and neither moved. “What exactly were your orders?”

“To assist and protect you.”

“God, Marlowe must be desperate.” Frick remained impassive, but Frack’s lips quirked slightly. I saw them. “Look, I don’t have time to explain. But if there’s one fey, there’s probably more—maybe a lot more. And they don’t have any problem with engaging.”

Frick still didn’t say anything, but Frack stirred slightly. “If they spot her tracking them, we will have no choice but to defend her. And if there are others, the odds in that event might not be favorable.”

Frick didn’t respond, but after a moment, he sighed. The next second, they melted into the night after the fey. I gave them a brief head start and did likewise.

Away from the market’s dazzling glare, the street was a half-perceived tangle of tumbled shapes and awkward angles. The coat was barely a glimmer, its radiance swallowed by the shadows crowding thick and suffocating on all sides, and the vampire was just a slightly different texture of night.

I didn’t see what happened, exactly. One minute, the coat was gaining on the vampire, and the next, it had simply disappeared. It might have been jerked into an alley or side street, but it hadn’t looked that way. From back where I was standing, it appeared to simply vanish.

Marlowe’s boys were good. I wondered what they pla

I emerged onto a busy cross street in time to see the vampire pass into a pot noodle place on a corner. I followed and found it jam-packed with waiters shouting orders, people standing three and four deep at the counter and crowding the small tables. But a quick glance around told me that my two weren’t among them.

I headed through the swinging door to the kitchen. I’d expected to be called on it, but I merited no more than a disinterested glance from the staff, who were sweating bullets trying to keep up with all the orders. I crossed to the back door, which was propped open to help with ventilation.

Outside, a graffiti- covered wall loomed over a small space filled with a stone table, a lot of cigarette butts and a heap of garbage bags. A tattered awning fluttered overhead on a small breeze. The remains of someone’s di

It was dark. It was quiet. It was utterly boring.

I glanced back at the kitchen, where the staff were still scurrying around, ignoring me. They seemed way too comfortable with guests roaming around their private preserve. I had the feeling a lot of people came this way. The question was, where did they go then?

I paused beside the table. Despite the utter normalcy of the scene, something was wrong. It took me a minute to realize it was the garbage.

The flies buzzing about the half-eaten meal were totally ignoring the bounty in the trash bags nearby. I walked over to the pile, my nose twitching. Not at what I smelled, but at what I didn’t.

I’d expected the pungent odor of soured beer, the sharp acid of wilting vegetables, the stench of rotting meat. I’d expected it to smell bad. But it didn’t. It didn’t smell like much of anything, which was fair because it wasn’t actually there.

It’s never a good idea to stick anything you’d mind losing through an opaque ward. I went back to the kitchen, where a mountain of real garbage bags had been piled in a corner. The third one I tried yielded an empty industrial-sized aluminum foil container. In the center was a long cardboard tube, which I fished out and took back to the ward.

It wasn’t fancy, but my makeshift periscope allowed me to peek beneath without risking my head. The tube didn’t immediately catch fire or get chopped in two, which I counted as a plus. Of course, that didn’t mean that there were no booby traps, just that any that existed were farther down.

The tube showed me a flight of steps leading down to a safety door. Light radiated through the ornate grille casting black traceries of shadow over the stairs. It also cast the silhouette of someone in the room beyond the door, tipped back against the wall, with what looked suspiciously like a rifle in the crook of one elbow. I couldn’t get a scent reading on him, but not because of the ward. The sweet pungency of high-quality weed drifted up the stairs, filling my nose to the exclusion of anything else.

The fact that he had a rifle didn’t mean he wasn’t a vamp, but the weed probably did. Drugs had no effect on the vampire lack of a metabolism and so were uninteresting to them. They had plenty of other vices to compensate.

I stood up, tucked the tube inside my jacket and jumped through the ward. Any lingering doubt I’d had as to the type of doorkeeper I was facing wore off when there was no immediate response to the small tone the ward sent out at my entry. By the time the shadow’s bootheels hit the cracked cement underfoot, I was already at the bottom of the stairs and reaching through the iron cage to grab him by the shirt. A quick slam of his head against the unyielding doors knocked him out and the keys were in his pocket.

Simple.

What wasn’t so simple was what was reverberating off the walls. It sounded like drums or too many hearts beating too fast. I couldn’t pin it down, but it was doing bad things to my blood pressure. I stepped through the door and over the inert guard, taking a second to attach him to the grille with the cuffs he’d thoughtfully had in his back pocket.