Siren Song

2

So, calling for help didn’t work. No surprise. I passed the phone back to him and he tucked it into the inner pocket of his suit jacket, his fingers trembling just the tiniest bit. I could hardly blame him, so I did my best to ignore it. Fortunately, now that I realized the situation, years of training and therapy kicked in and the dread of an unknown future faded into the background. “We need a plan.” My voice was nicely calm. I doubted that the good doctor had any clue just how impressive that was.

He raised a single, eloquent eyebrow.

“Dr. Scott, have you ever been kidnapped?” My voice was as coldly polite as I could manage. I was not hysterical, though I deserved to be. But I’ve been in life-threatening crises before. While you never get used to it, you learn control, to cope. Either that or you lose your mind. So far I’ve hung on to my sanity. Barely.

“Of course not!” he snapped.

“Lucky you. I have.” I forced myself not to shudder at memories I prefer to leave in the past. I’d been kidnapped as a child, by men who wanted my little sister to use her talent with the dead to find them treasure, like they’d read of a little boy doing in Florida. I had scars, physical and mental, but I’d gotten through it. She hadn’t. My sister’s ghost is a daily reminder of the experience. She’d attached to me after death and, much like Vicki—whose ghost had been the life of the party at her own wake—we weren’t really certain what business she had yet to complete while she was tied to this realm.

Oh, and I’d also been drugged and set up for a murder charge just a few short days ago. “Trust me, this is the fun part. It only gets worse from here. If you’re not going to help me, I suggest you stay the hell out of my way. Because I don’t intend to go down quietly.”

He took his time thinking about that. I knew he knew at least part of my history, medical and psychological. He was Vicki’s doctor, after all, and she knew the whole story. He’d also personally assigned the doctor who betrayed me after I was bitten by a vampire. In my opinion, if he’d vetted her a bit more carefully, she wouldn’t have been able to slip me a “roofie” and set me up for murder.

Bad things seem to follow me like a far-too-devoted puppy. I don’t know why. But my past experiences give me a certain insight in situations like this.

He was obviously thinking hard. While he did, he reached over to the bar and began fixing us each a drink. Scotch, neat, poured into little plastic cups. Liquid courage. I sniffed to make sure it wasn’t drugged. Still, I didn’t take a drink until after he did with no ill effects.

“How do you propose to do anything with us trapped like this?”

I didn’t answer him directly. Instead, I raised my face to the open sunroof. “Ivy. I need you.” I was pretty sure she’d answer. Ivy is always with me. Of course, since she was only a child when she was murdered, her power and her perceptions are limited. But I’d sent Vicki away to rest after the party, so Ivy was all I had available.

The temperature in the limo dropped precipitously. Magical barriers have little effect on the dead unless they’re intentionally set to keep them out. Dr. Scott started to shiver as frost began forming on the inside surface of the tinted windows. My sister was here. His eyes widened and I saw him withdraw a small spiral notebook and a pen from a jacket pocket. Yeah, in his position, this sort of thing was probably worth taking notes on.

I whispered quietly in case the backseat was bugged, “Can you blow a tire on the car for me? Maybe even pull the plug wires?” It was asking a lot. I knew that. But I knew she could do it . . . just. At least the tire. I wasn’t positive she knew what plug wires looked like. She was only eight when she died, and so far it seemed to me that what she had when she died was all she got to keep as a ghost.

The overhead light blinked once. It was a standard code between the two of us: once for yes, twice for no.

“You actually think that is going to work?” Dr. Scott didn’t bother to mask his incredulous expression.

“I wouldn’t ask her to expend the energy if I didn’t. That would be pointless and cruel. Beside, do you have a better idea?” I snapped out the words quietly but with whiplike precision. “I sure as hell don’t want to get into the middle of nowhere with them. Look, Doc, first rule of survival—stay in public when you can. Anything they want to do to you where there are no witnesses you don’t want to have happen.”

“Oh.” He took a long pull of his drink. It sloshed a little bit. His hand was shaking again—not much, and he was covering it well. But he was trembling with fear. I couldn’t blame him. “By the way, call me Jeff.” He gave me a sour smile, his voice thick with sarcasm and barely suppressed anger. “All my fellow kidnap victims do.”

I couldn’t deny we’d just stepped beyond the doctor-patient thing. “Okay . . . Jeff. Look, my hope is they’ll have to drop the spell to get in the trunk to get the jack.”

He glared at me over the rim of his second scotch. “And what if they use the jack and spare from one of the squad cars?”

I glared at him. Now he was just being difficult. “Then they’ll have to drop the spell to take off the old tire.” I paused and sighed. “Look, like I said. You don’t have to help me.” I turned my attention to the vehicles outside the window. “I wish I knew whether those are real cops out there. I don’t want to go to the state facility. But I don’t want to go up against the cops, either.” It was a hint and he caught on at once.

“Nobody has told me about any change in the Court’s order, and they would. But intruding on their thoughts is illegal.” He was getting angry.

“So is kidnapping.”

He didn’t have a response to that. “If they’re with the police, I’ll be as guilty as you.”

“If they’re the cops, I’m Aunt Jemima.” I pretended a certainty I didn’t actually feel. Most cops are good people. But they’re people. Which means there are always going to be a few bad apples. “Real cops would have stopped the car once we were out of a crowded area and told us they’ve received different orders. At the very least, they would have placed a uniform in the backseat. Right?”

He didn’t deny it, but his body language was angry, his back stiff, as he pretended to stare out the window, refusing to look me in the eye. “It’s wrong.”

“Fine. Then don’t do it. I’ll just have to take my chances. But stay the hell out of the way. Because I’m not going along with whatever they have planned for me.”

He didn’t argue, probably because he didn’t blame me. But his conscience wasn’t the problem; fear was controlling him. I could even understand it. I’d seen him hold it together in life-threatening situations before. But that had been on his own turf, in the hospital, where he was prepared for just about anything natural or supernatural. This was different. He wasn’t the one in control. And I’ve never met anybody who is really comfortable around ghosts.

“Are you ready?” I asked my sister’s spirit.

The overhead light flickered once in response.

“Wait. Let me see if I can summon nine-one-one mentally.” He set his drink into the little recess made for it. “Because if they really are police, you’ll be resisting arrest and I’ll be an accomplice. They’d have every right to shoot to kill. Both of us.”

He wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know, so I didn’t comment. I just waited and watched. There wasn’t much to see. He leaned back in the cushions, closing his eyes, the very picture of relaxed concentration. That lasted all of thirty seconds or so, until he grabbed his head in both hands and screamed.

My adrenaline began racing anew as he doubled over and began throwing up everything he’d even thought of ingesting in the last twenty-four hours. That was the last straw. I spun in my seat and kicked the door with every ounce of strength, fully intending to pull the doctor out with me. The door mechanism gave way from sheer brute force, just as I expected, but I hadn’t anticipated the strength of the magical barrier. Normally, magic only prevents magical creatures from passing through. But this kicked the door right back at me as if it had reached the end of a bungee cord. The door caught my legs so suddenly and painfully that I tumbled backward, winding up crumpled against the opposite door, just barely missing the growing pool of vomit.

The door was now hanging at a slight angle and wasn’t latched. But it wasn’t open.

Shit.

I ignored my throbbing calf muscles as I crawled back onto the seat. I used one of the bottled waters from the bar to wet some napkins and handed them to Jeff so he could wipe his face. There wasn’t much we could do about the mess. It stank hideously to my newly supernatural nose and was generally disgusting to my still-human sensibilities. The wake had been at a Mexican restaurant known for spicy food and apparently he’d had copious amounts of tequila. Not pleasant. I scooted away as far as the seat would allow.

I heard the click and static of a speaker and a distorted male voice came over the intercom, just as the doctor screamed a second time. His face was contorted out of proportion, and this time even I could feel the psychic wave that invisibly assaulted him. “We’ve prepared for every eventuality, including your talents, Dr. Scott. Miss Graves, I’d suggest you not try any other foolish pranks or any mental manipulation—brain damage would be a very real possibility.” The speaker clicked off.

Shit. These definitely weren’t the cops.

Dr. Scott collapsed onto the cushions. His eyes were glazed and his breathing shallow and ragged. “Jeff? Are you all right?” Stupid question. Of course he wasn’t. But it’s what you say in situations like this.

It took him a minute to answer and when he did his voice was hoarse. “Do I look all right to you?” He glared up at me.

All I could do was shrug, embarrassed. He might not have gotten the second dose if I hadn’t kicked the door. “Sorry.”

“Give me a minute.” He had another bout of dry heaves. They sounded painful enough to make me feel really bad for him. More than a little guilty, too. When he finally finished, he moved carefully to a spot as far from the vomit as he could get, sinking limply into the seat.

“Um . . . can you see?” I asked him.

“Yes. Why?”

“You’ve broken some blood vessels in your eyes.” Actually, he’d broken most of them. His eyes didn’t have whites. They had reds. That was going to hurt soon. Badly.

“Terrific.” He sighed, closing his eyes. “At least I got a few things from his mind as he was attacking me.”

Really? Wow. Tough guy, after all.

“They’re not with the police. But they have someone on the inside, someone who gave them access to squad cars from the repair lot.”

I opened my mouth to get Ivy started, but apparently he wasn’t finished.

“Originally, they really were just going to deliver you to the state facility. Your future roommate has been paid to kill you. After I climbed in the car with you, they called the person in charge and there was a change of plans.”

His voice was a whisper that I probably wouldn’t have been able to pick up if I were still a vanilla human. There was a thread of rage running through it. They might have hurt him, but he wasn’t out of the fight yet. Assuming he didn’t go into psychic shock, which, looking at him, he just might. “Oh?”

“They’re going to kill me and make it look like you did it, then claim they had to kill you in self-defense.”

Great. Why wasn’t I surprised? “You got all of that in a couple of seconds? I’m impressed.” I meant it. The human brain is a maze. At any given time most people are thinking one primary thing, but there’s all kinds of stuff going on in the background, autonomic physical functions, background sights and sounds that the conscious mind filters out but the subconscious records. It takes real skill and strong talent to pull out individual threads from the mess. Jeff had barely had any time to work with and had come up with the jackpot . . . while being tortured.

“Nice work.”

He kept on talking, fast and low, like he had to get it all out in case they noticed his lips moving. He was probably right. “The guy I looked in on had just been talking to the boss, so it was at the front of his consciousness. I’d have gotten more if he hadn’t caught me at it. That was probably why they attacked me the second time.”

Maybe. But I figured I was sort of at fault, too. “You did good.” Of course he knew that. “I’m sorry you got hurt.”

“I’ll live.” He didn’t really look like he believed it, but—

“Here’s hoping we both will.” I took a deep breath. “You ready?”

Jeff wedged himself into the corner, one arm pressed hard against the gray leather seat, trying to make it seem casual in case they were watching through the tinted glass. Then he pushed his other hand against the cabin wall. He still looked like hell. Pale, with beads of sweat on his forehead. But his expression was determined and he gave me a curt nod.

“Okay, Ivy, do it.”

It took about a ten count before the car lurched left, hard enough to send me sliding across the slick leather. She’d chosen the tires. The force of the move to the side told me she’d gotten both on one side. I whispered to the cool breeze that flitted around, proud of herself, “Attagirl!” Our speed slowed and the driver moved over to the side of the road. Out of the corner of my eye, through the tinted partition, I saw the limo driver reach over to flick the intercom button.

“Don’t try anything stupid.” He turned to glare at us in the rearview mirror, then turned it down as he swept his jacket aside, giving me a good look at a very nice Glock.

I hoped he thought the flat tires were random chance, that they hadn’t been listening in on my thoughts. I wanted the element of surprise if I could get it. Because while I’d tried to act confident for Jeff’s benefit, the truth was that I could barely dignify this by calling it a plan. It was more the equivalent of a last-second Hail Mary pass.

“Too late for that,” Jeff muttered, but without heat. Finding out that he was scheduled to die seemed to have given him a totally different outlook on making an escape attempt.

I leaned over and grabbed the champagne bottle and a glass. The glass was for show. The driver was watching through the glass as he dialed his cell phone. Let him think I needed another drink. I adjusted my position under the skylight as carefully as I could manage without being obvious. Tensing my muscles, I dropped the glass and started shaking the bottle vigorously. The driver had his back to us now, talking on his cell phone—which worked. Since I hadn’t felt the magic go down, the front of the car wasn’t covered by the spell. Which meant it was probably fifty-fifty odds whether the trunk and tires were. Crap. “Remember, as soon as the barrier goes down, try dialing nine-one-one.” I sounded more confident than I felt. Not that that took much.

Jeff flicked a thumbs-up at me. He already had his cell phone out and I could see the numbers displayed prominently on the screen. All he had to do was press “send.” I was gathering my strength, making sure of my placement. I can do this. I almost believed me, but it wouldn’t be easy.

Keeping the driver in my peripheral vision, I strained the power that let me sense magic to the fullest. Luck was on our side. The second his hand touched the door handle I felt the barrier waver and fall. Still, I waited. I waited for that golden instant when he was outside the car and couldn’t see. If I was lucky, it would be before the others got the door to our part of the limo open and their guns trained on us. They were bound to do it, but I was betting they were going to head for the damaged door.

Time slowed to a crawl. The driver climbed out of the car. I slid from my seat into a crouch. As his door slammed shut I sprang upward, champagne bottle at the ready.

The windowsill scraped against my back as I passed through the sunroof, but didn’t slow me down. In an instant that seemed to take forever, I soared nearly ten feet into the air. Thanks to adrenaline and vampire strength, I’d gotten a lot more loft than I’d expected. More than my captors had planned, too. The three cars had pulled onto the side of the road in a line, with the limo in the center. To my surprise there seemed to be only four men escorting us. Under the circumstances, I was thrilled.

The night was to my advantage. I could see the men as clearly as if it were daylight, despite the deep shadows that made the landscape disappear. Each man glowed and pulsed in time to the blood flowing beneath his paper-thin skin. I stayed in the air longer than should be realistically possible and it confused them.

The man in the front squad car was the smartest. He’d ignored the obvious exit of the door and already had his gun out, trained on the sunroof. The leap had startled him, but he was recovering, his weapon moving up to track my progress. So he got the prize. If it caught the guy with him so much the better. I flung the champagne bottle with all my strength to the ground at his feet. The shaken, pressurized alcohol exploded like a bomb, sending vicious shards of glass outward, shredding his face and legs as he screamed in agony.

The limo driver had been turned slightly to open the door to the passenger cabin, so he was a fraction too slow on the draw. By the time he had his gun out I’d landed on the roof. He looked at me squarely, confidence in his cold blue eyes. So I hissed and bared fangs, my skin creating its own gray-green light. It startled him enough that he gasped and took a step back. That was what I’d hoped for. I had just enough time to send a spinning kick into his temple. I heard bone breaking and knew he was dead before he hit the ground.

Two down. But there was a luxury sedan racing toward us, black, with tinted windows. I didn’t have time to do more than note it as a blur because the third man had me at a disadvantage and I’d lost sight of the fourth entirely. I was betting he’d slid underneath one of the cars. The Jimmy Choo pumps Vicki had given me for my birthday weren’t intended for the slick surface of the waxed roof. They put me off-balance and my counterpart was armed and ready. He braced his semiauto on the frame of the car door that was shielding his body and began firing. He was coming alarmingly close despite my speed. I couldn’t take him. But I might not have to. Because the driver of the sedan was aiming it straight at the shooter while the wail of police cars in the distance grew louder with each second.

I did the only sensible thing I could think of. I jumped back down through the sunroof and hit the button for the door locks and roof, hoping to hide behind the nice, thick, bulletproof glass until help arrived. I nearly landed on Dr. Scott. He was slumped on the floor, eyes rolled back in his head and breathing shallow. I didn’t know if it was a delayed reaction to the earlier attack or if they’d gone after him again. All I could do was lift him onto the seat cushions and put cool, damp napkins on his forehead and the back of his neck while I waited for help to arrive.

Jeff was in psychic shock. The cops—the real cops—took him away in an ambulance, along with the limo’s real driver, who’d been found drugged and unconscious in the trunk. They didn’t take me. I asserted self-defense and asked for my attorney. So did Ivan.

Ivan Stefanovich had been driving the sedan and had opened the rear door to find me hovering over Jeff. I was honestly shocked to see him. A couple of weeks ago, during the fallout from my last job as a bodyguard, he’d been wounded badly enough that I hadn’t expected him to make it. Then again, he was one tough bastard. Ivan served as the right-hand-man-cum-security-chief for King Dahlmar of Rusland. The same King Dahlmar whose son I’d helped rescue from a major demon. Rusland is not be a big country, only maybe the size of Ohio. It’s tucked in between the Ukraine and Poland and touches on the Czech Republic as well.

Recently discovered reserves of natural gas made Rusland politically important. Ivan was an international headache for the cops—and he had diplomatic immunity. So we waited, with some seriously pissed-off cops. They wanted to hurt me. Hell, more than hurt me. I was a vampire and I’d been caught red-handed at a kill scene. I was toast—right up until they found out that the bodies on the ground had no bite marks and that I left no blood on the swab they ran around inside my cheeks. It didn’t make them any happier to discover the men in the uniforms around the real squad cars weren’t actually police. That pissed them off a lot. But at least they weren’t pissed at me after that. So I got to wait for my attorney inside a spelled circle, in handcuffs, as they processed the crime scene, instead of being staked on the spot.

Ms. Graves, if you can hear me, nod your head. Ivan’s voice came clearly inside my skull. He’d told the cops he was a registered mage. I’d forgotten he was a telepath. He’d only used that talent in front of me once—at the World Series game when we’d discovered one of King Dahlmar’s sons was being kidnapped.

I gave a tiny nod. Nothing noticeable.

Good. I was afraid the spelled circle would interfere, as the barrier around the car did.

Since until recently I had no psychic talent, I’m not very good at talking mind-to-mind. I hoped my intense concentration wasn’t showing on my face as I replied, Not that I’m complaining, but how did you know to come riding up like the cavalry?

I could almost hear the puzzlement in his thoughts. Either I sucked at thinking at him or the reference was too American for his English.

I was waiting outside the tribute to your deceased friend. I wished to speak with you. I saw them attack the driver. When the police guarding the doors did nothing, I decided to wait for a better opportunity.

Shit. The police outside the party had seen the switch? And didn’t stop it? That was wrong. Really wrong. Thank God Ivan had been there. But why had he? And why had he come riding to the rescue? My past experiences with him hadn’t shown him to be the most altruistic guy on the planet. In fact, he’d calmly left a man to die in order to follow his orders.

He answered my questions as if I’d voiced them aloud. I wasn’t surprised he’d been listening to my thoughts. Not everybody has Jeff’s ethics.

My king does not know I have come to you. But you may be our only hope.

What in the world could I do that a nation’s king and all the money and favor of a hundred countries desperately trying to gain a strategic ally couldn’t? What do you want from me?

“All right. That’s enough, you two. I said no talking.” Ivan’s reply—if he had been going to make one—never came. The detective who’d set up the magic circle I was standing in straightened from where he’d been chatting with someone near the bodies. Whatever the guy had told him hadn’t made him happy. He stalked over to where I stood, my hands securely cuffed behind my back. He bent down, pressed his finger to the edge of the circle, and began muttering a spell. Sound disappeared from the world and my vision sparkled like I’d been slammed face-first into a brick wall. I gasped in pain as the increased power burned across my skin. I didn’t say anything, but he must’ve seen me flinch, because a look of satisfaction flickered across his face for just an instant. It was so quick, it could’ve been a trick of my imagination. But I knew it wasn’t.

When they eventually released me to go to Birchwoods, Ivan was long gone. We never did get to talk. That worried me. Because once I got inside the facility, I probably wasn’t going to be allowed calls or visitors for quite some time. There wasn’t anything I could do about that, but it was a problem just the same. I pondered it on the long drive down Ocean View. This time I had a real police escort, and more. News crews had been minding their scanners and we wound up with lots of company. The more the merrier, as far as I was concerned. I wanted witnesses to this whole debacle. Something had gone horribly wrong within the police force to have this happen. There apparently hadn’t been any sort of citywide all-points bulletin when I went missing, because that was one of the questions the nice reporters asked the incident commander. Keeping everything public and under the media microscope offered me the best possible protection. It’d be a damned nuisance. But I could live with that. Emphasis on the “live.”

We made the drive in broad daylight because it had taken hours to deal with the fallout from the kidnapping attempt. I was glad for the press and for Roberto Santos. My attorney had rightfully insisted that I be moved out of the confining circle and behind tinted windows before the sun could crisp me.

I stared out the window at Birchwoods, wondering what it was that Ivan needed and wishing for about the millionth time that the damned bat had just bitten me and been done with it rather than trying to bring me over. He’d turned me into an abomination that was not vampire, human, or siren but some unholy mix of the three.

In the eyes of most of the cops I was a monster, one step below a dangerous animal, and now I’d publicly embarrassed the whole department. There were bodies on the ground and the police cars were real. Of course, the fourth suspect had gotten away. Maybe they’d catch him. Maybe not.

I had the sickening feeling this whole night was somehow going to wind up being my fault.