Lost Falls_Short Story_Blood Money Read online

  And that doesn’t just apply to mirrors. Silver is a major component of photographic film—snap a Polaroid of a vampire and it’ll come out blurred and indistinct, every time. The vampires of Lost Falls never had to worry about being photographed before.

  Except digital camera sensors don’t rely on silver. Which means anyone with an iPhone can get themselves as many crystal clear vampire pictures as they desire.

  As I looked closer, though, I noticed something. “I don’t think these were taken with the phone. They’re too grainy. And it looks like they were using a fish-eye lens or something.”

  Early grunted. “Then why are they on the phone?”

  “How tall is Christina? These photos were all taken from a low angle.” I chewed my lip, thinking about it. “You think she’s using one of those hidden cameras like they have in the movies?”

  “Might explain why none of the guests seem to mind her taking their picture.”

  I nodded and swiped through to the phone’s settings. “Look. Her Bluetooth is on. Could explain how the photos got from the camera to the phone.”

  “What’s a Bluetooth?”

  I shot Early a look. “Christ, you’re old. Never mind. This has to be Lockhart’s party, right? Where do you think this is?”

  “Looks like the Crucible Lake Hotel. Lockhart owns it.”

  “The vampire queen owns a hotel?”

  “It’s more of a lodge. I don’t think just anyone can get a reservation there. Mostly she keeps it for entertaining powerful Strangers.”

  “’Course she does. You recognize any of these bloodsuckers?”

  “Some.” He took the phone off me and swiped through. “Here’s our client, talking to…oh, what’s his name? Some minor vampire in the brood. I think that’s Lockhart herself over by the fireplace. Hard to tell with so many swains around her.” He swiped again. “And that’s…hmmm.”

  “What?”

  “How do you zoom in?”

  I helped him zoom in on a darkened doorway leading off the main room. Two figures stood facing each other just inside the doorway: a tall man and a shorter, curvier woman. The man had a hand on the woman’s shoulder, as if directing her out of the room.

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  “I can’t be sure,” Early said, squinting at the phone, “but I think that’s Francis Serrano.”

  “Who?”

  “Sonja Lockhart’s loremaster. A vampire with a certain amount of influence within the brood. But that…” He pointed to the woman. “That isn’t his swain. It’s Lockhart’s.”

  “I take it by your tone this Serrano guy shouldn’t be hanging about in dark hallways with his boss’s swain.”

  “I don’t think it’s generally advised, no.” He swiped to the next photo. “And it looks like our photographer agrees.”

  I peered over his shoulder at the phone. Early was right. It seemed Christina—or whoever was taking the photos—had noticed the same thing we had. The next photo was taken from the doorway—the photographer was following Serrano and the swain. The two of them were disappearing through a set of French doors out into the night. Early flipped through to the next photo, and the next.

  “Wait,” I said. “Is he…?”

  Early nodded gravely. “It’s hard to tell. But I think so.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means,” he said, “that these photos are very valuable. And very dangerous.”

  He swiped to the last photo in the chain, the last photo taken before Christina Liu disappeared. According to the time stamp, it’d been taken more than an hour after the previous photo. This one didn’t show a beautiful lodge or a party full of vampires. It didn’t show much of anything. It was so dark that the picture was little more than grainy noise and faint silhouettes. A fallen tree trunk. The gnarled wreck of a car. And a figure looming out of the darkness. A lithe figure draped in black.

  A figure with a goat skull for a head.

  Fingers of dread brushed at the back of my neck. Early and I stared at the photo in silence for a few seconds. Then he let out a breath and looked at me.

  “We should deliver this to Kinfe,” he said.

  “Like hell. These photos are too damn blurry to be of any real use. And besides, we don’t have time. You know as well as I do what’s going to happen to Christina if we don’t—”

  A pained groan cut me off. We spun around to see Hider curled up against the bank, his mossy eyebrows pulled down low in a look of agony. He shuddered and vomited a bathtub’s worth of black oily goop onto the earth beside him.

  “Hider!” Early shoved Christina’s phone back into my hand and rushed to the troll’s side.

  The black lump on Hider’s side was pulsing. The curse was resisting Early’s attempts to bring it under control. The troll was running out of time.

  Early met my eyes. I didn’t have to tell him what I was planning. The old man knew me too well. I began to pull on my damp shoes and socks.

  “Ozzy,” he said. “No. It’s too dangerous. Just take the phone to our client.”

  “And what about him?” I jerked my chin toward the troll.

  Early licked his lips, shook his head. “Ozzy…”

  “Keep him alive a while longer,” I said. “Keep your phone on. I’ll call you on the way and tell you what I need you to do.”

  “Ozzy, wait!”

  I shoved Christina’s phone into my pocket and started scrambling up the bank toward the van. “Just keep him alive!” I called over my shoulder. “I’ll get him what he needs.”

  3

  Crucible Lake was a few miles south of the stretch of road where Christina had crashed her car. It was a secluded little lake that’d probably been the crater of some ancient volcano a few hundred thousand years ago. It was the sort of place you’d expect to be crammed full of jet skis and speed boats every summer, but for some reason that never seemed to happen. I wondered if Lockhart and her brood had anything to do with that.

  No waves or ripples marred the stillness of the lake as I crept along its edge. The reflection of the evening moon on the water was so perfect that for a moment I had the strangest sensation that I was upside-down, walking along the roof of the world and looking down at the night sky below. I squeezed my eyes shut, shook my head, and forced the world back up the right way. I should’ve known it was a bad idea to skip dinner.

  Lockhart’s hotel sat crouched on the edge of the lake, a giant of wood and stone staring out at the water. Lights burned in most of the windows, and I heard the sound of revelry from inside. The second night of Lockhart’s party was ramping up.

  Kinfe would be here tonight, along with Lockhart and all the rest of the bloodsuckers. This wasn’t just a bit of fun for them—this was political. It was a chance to make deals amongst each other, share rumors, win influence.

  Spread out around the hotel itself were the grounds: terraced gardens, a tennis court, a few maintenance buildings, and the parking lot full of fancy cars with tinted windows. A low wooden fence ringed the whole lot, except for a gate at the entrance that led to the only nearby road. Beyond that, the forest reigned.

  Of course, a measly little fence wasn’t the only thing protecting the property. It’d taken me more than an hour of careful rituals to cut a hole through the property’s defensive wards so I could sneak in undetected. I’d been lucky enough to catch the last of the day’s sunlight as I did it—vampiric sorcery was at its weakest at dawn and dusk.

  Unfortunately, that meant I was creeping about at night. And in this place, the night didn’t belong to me. I couldn’t see any vampires out wandering the grounds, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. With the sun set, they were free to walk beneath the sky without fear. Some of them would surely be savoring that opportunity.

  Sneaking unannounced into a vampire’s private domain is generally considered a really fucking bad idea. I was acutely aware of that as I scurried along beneath the light of the moon, using flower beds and hedges and an oversi
zed sundial as meager cover.

  I just didn’t see any way around it. If I drew attention to myself before I found Christina Liu, I probably wouldn’t find her at all. Not alive, at least.

  If I got caught here, well, I had to hope like hell they gave me a chance to explain myself before I was torn limb from limb, my blood drained for a vampire’s supper.

  Better to beg forgiveness than ask permission, right?

  I swallowed my fear and crouched behind a low rock wall where I’d be mostly out of sight from the hotel. Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out the one thing that might lead me to Christina. Her glasses.

  On their own, they wouldn’t be much use to me. Hell, considering how beat up they’d gotten in the car crash they wouldn’t be much use to Christina either.

  I hadn’t had time to brew up a full-blown tracking potion. So before I arrived at the lake, I’d climbed into the back of my van to do the next best thing.

  I’d started with Christina’s hair. I still had a few strands I’d pulled from her hairbrush. With a pair of tweezers I’d fed the strands into the flame of a soulwax candle. The flame had sputtered and turned golden, filling the inside of my van with a smell like old swamp water. With the candle slowly burning down, I prepared a written charm—words of power scrawled in red ink on a scrap of lambskin parchment. That went into the candle flame as well. A trail of red smoke began to fill the van. Next step was the glasses.

  The connection between a person and their possessions can be surprisingly strong. Sometimes that connection is even strong enough that someone like me can tap into it.

  That depends on several factors, though. Emotion is often a big one. And I don’t just mean positive emotions. An object with sentimental value is all fine and good, but if I can find something that the person really hates, something that causes them great pain, then I’m really cooking with gas.

  Material matters as well. Silver, iron, and wood are the ones I usually look for. They can absorb their owner’s emotion, store it. So a treasured silver locket given to the missing person by their beloved dead grandma makes a damn good starting point for any magic I’m working.

  The glasses, though, they were something a little different. I mean, they were just plastic frames with a little stainless steel and some glass for the lenses. Certainly nothing as impressive as silver. And I doubted Christina had any particular love or hate for the glasses. They were just something she wore.

  But that was just it. She wore them day in, day out, probably for years. She viewed the world through these glasses.

  Eyelight is a powerful thing. Hell, certain Strangers have been known to hunt and kill people for their eyelight.

  Christina’s eyelight painted the world for her. It let her look at herself in the mirror, let her view sunsets and thunderstorms, showed her flowers in bloom and broken beer bottles in the gutter.

  Eyelight isn’t something I usually concern myself with. But these were unusual circumstances. Every hour, every day, some tiny fraction of Christina’s eyelight was absorbed by the lenses of her glasses on the way to her eyes. I was tapping into that pool, hoping it would resonate with the rest of Christina’s eyelight.

  And maybe, with a little luck, it would show me where she’d been taken.

  Crouched down in the grass before the Crucible Lake Hotel, I unfolded the bent arms of Christina’s glasses. One lens had been cracked in the car crash. That one I hadn’t touched. The other lens was the one that would show me the way.

  Back in the van, I’d taken the burning soulwax candle and dripped hot wax across the surface of the intact lens. When the wax dried, it completely covered the glass. Taking a breath, I brought the glasses to my face and slipped them on.

  It wasn’t the most comfortable fit. My head was a lot bigger than Christina’s, apparently. The frame was so bent I couldn’t get the glasses to sit straight on my nose. I hoped like hell there weren’t any vampires secretly watching me right now. I looked ridiculous.

  I exhaled, cleared my mind, and peered out at the hotel grounds. My right eye stared through a cracked lens that shifted everything out of focus, while my left eye stared into the dark of the candle wax. Slowly I turned in a circle, letting my eyes relax.

  She had to be here somewhere. She had to be. My little trick with the glasses was no substitute for a real tracking potion. This wouldn’t allow me to follow her across any kind of distance. If she was nearby, then maybe it could give me some glimpses, some hints. But if she wasn’t here…

  As I turned away from the lake, a shape flickered into my vision. An indistinct shape, like an afterimage seared into my retinas. I couldn’t make out any details, but I could tell one thing—the shape was humanoid.

  The blurry figure twitched about for a couple of seconds, like some kind of stop-motion monster from an old B movie. Then the thing faded from my sight.

  Slipping from cover, I darted across the grounds, passing trees and crossing stone paths as I headed for the spot I’d seen the figure appear. The glasses made my world blurry. At any second I expected to run square into some vampire or swain that I hadn’t noticed. I could hear deep-throated laughter from one of the hotel balconies. Hopefully not at my expense.

  Another blurry afterimage faded into view ahead of me. I was closer to it now. It seemed to be walking away from me, an indistinct silhouette taking long, graceful strides across the grass. There was no sound to accompany it, no footfalls or crunching grass.

  The shape began to fade again. As I closed on it, the thing paused, turned. For a moment my heart tightened, fearing the figure had noticed me. But of course, that was stupid. The thing wasn’t real. It wasn’t here. It was nothing but a shadow, a memory, a scrap of eyelight given form.

  As it turned toward me, though, I noticed it was carrying something slung across its shoulder. No, not something. Someone. A small, slender figure, barely moving.

  Both figures disappeared as I reached them. Cursing softly, I paused and looked around once more. I was near the southern edge of the hotel grounds now, in some less-used part of the property. A row of trees stood in a tight line near me, acting as a border between the gardens and what looked like the staff areas of the grounds. Beyond, I could just make out the blurry shape of some small building. As I watched, the indistinct figures appeared one last time, heading away from me again. They faded a few seconds later, but not before I saw where they were going.

  I removed the glasses and blinked a few times, letting my eyes readjust. Damn things had given me a splitting headache.

  When I could see clearly again, I looked in the direction I’d last seen the figures moving. Through the trees I could make out a caretaker’s shed painted a dark brown to blend in with the woods beyond.

  I crept silently toward it.

  As I moved, I unhooked my truncheon from my belt and began to unscrew the pommel at its base. The weight came loose, revealing a sharpened point carved from the oak handle. In my line of work, it paid to have a wooden stake handy.

  By the time I reached the caretaker’s shed my heart was hammering so loud I was afraid they’d hear it from the hotel. Part of me hoped I was wrong, that Christina Liu was nowhere near here. Then I could just slip away, shrug my shoulders, and tell myself I’d tried my best.

  My gut told me that was a fool’s hope.

  The shed was about the size of a small shipping container. It had no windows and only a single pair of large double doors secured with a padlock. I glanced around at the woods and the hotel grounds, searching for any eyes watching me in the darkness. I was alone.

  I crouched down and put my ear to the door, listening. A breeze whistled softly through the cracks in the shed. I couldn’t hear anything else moving inside.

  I dug my lock picks out of my pocket and got to work on the padlock. Lock picking was a skill I’d picked up during a misspent youth, but it came in surprisingly handy in my current line of work as well.

  The lock popped open. With one last glance around I readied my tr
uncheon-cum-stake and nudged open the door with my foot.

  The smells of oil and grass clippings wafted out of the shed. And beneath that I picked up another scent: a hint of human sweat. I paused and listened once more. Over the whistling of the breeze and the creak of the door’s hinges I heard the sound of soft, rasping breathing.

  The inside of the shed was nearly pitch black. Thin shafts of moonlight entered through cracks and joins in the shed. I could just make out the shape of some workshop shelves along the left wall, and another large silhouette in the center that looked like a riding mower. With no other choice, I slipped inside, closed the door behind me, and switched on my phone’s light.

  The beam of light illuminated swirls of dust disturbed by my entry. Spider webs clung to the corners of the shed. The bare concrete underfoot was marred with dirt where the riding mower had been driven inside.

  I swept the light around, past the mower that filled most of the space inside the shed. And then I saw her.

  Christina Liu sat with her legs curled beneath her on the cold concrete at the far end of the shed. Her head was bowed and her dark hair covered her face. Her arms were raised above her head, tied to a support beam with rope. I could hear her ragged breathing, but she didn’t move even when my light touched her.

  Alive. My heart quickened, but I forced myself to be calm, to think carefully. Kneeling down, I took out a long, thin glass vial from my bag and laid it on the concrete near the door, setting it in a crack so it wouldn’t roll away. Then I took out a second vial—this one nearly spherical—and moved it to my pocket where I’d be able to access it.

  I stood up and shone my light at Christina again. She hadn’t moved. I edged around the mower, carefully making my way toward her.

  As I came closer I noticed congealed blood matted in her hair. She was wearing what I guessed was the clothes she’d worn to the party last night—a dark blue dress that pooled around her legs and an unbuttoned short-sleeved jacket. Both were looking a little worse for wear. The dress was torn in a dozen places, dirtied and bloodied all over.