Forsaken Read online

  He’s in the details, apparently.

  Cyrus let out a heavy breath. “Dominika has a reflection because she is a solid form.”

  “Uh-huh.” I nodded.

  “If something has form, that form will cast a reflection. It’s physics.” He looked at me like I was wearing a big-ass dunce cap.

  “But it’s vampire lore; can’t that defy logic and things like science?”

  There’s got to be some truth in this. Ain’t nobody making that shit up.

  “Logic is relative and science is in its infancy, regardless of what scientists may assume. Lore is just that: lore. Vampires, goblins, ghosts and the rest are all part and parcel of the human emotion of fear. That’s not to say they are not all in existence, only their story is probably different than what you’ve heard.”

  “So, everything is real. All of it. But they’re all just misunderstood?” I was skeptical.

  “Not exactly. Misunderstood could indicate they are not what they are feared to be. They are, for all intents and purposes, quite terrifying.” A smile tickled the edge of Cyrus’s mouth. I didn’t know what he found so fucking funny, but the way he looked at me made me think he was a tad terrifying himself.

  Dominika sauntered into our group carrying a tray with booze-filled glasses teetering on it. She handed them out and shoved one in my face. I hadn’t asked for a drink. In fact, I’d refused with good cause. Dominika shoved it into my hand anyway and a bit sloshed over the side.

  Clutching my tiny glass, I asked the only question which had carried on with me through my trials and tribulations. “Vampires, fact or fake?” He made a face and tilted his head back and forth, indicating my assumption wasn’t exactly correct. “Jesus.” I closed my eyes and shook my head.

  Slamming my drink back, I was a tad grateful the Hungarian bitch had forced it on me. The liquid was through the lips, over the gums, and careening its way to my gut before Cyrus had a chance to expand on his ho-humming.

  “Vampires are a thing of fiction.” Could have fooled me. “Vampires were made up by writers and directors to sell books and make movies.” Dominika tossed the tray on the couch behind her and plopped down unattractively beside Cyrus, obviously uninterested in our conversation.

  “Garlic? Mirrors? Sunlight? What of all that?”

  “Mainstream vampire lore.” He shook his head.

  Too cool for garlic and sunlight? I was a vampire before it was the thing. Fucking vampire hipsters. Ha! Vampsters!

  “What exactly should I expect here?” I asked, annoyed with him and his non-linear storytelling.

  Mike nodded in agreement but hadn’t said a word otherwise. Dominika filed away at her pointed nails, making it clear she couldn’t care less what we were discussing. She seemed the type to not be affected by life or the horrid things it carried with it. She just scraped the sandpaper-on-cardboard over pointed, red nails.

  It’s the Vamp-ster, the Vampmeister, sharpenin’ her pen-cil. Inner Dylan, you watch far too much television.

  “I’m not understanding,” Cyrus responded and pulled my attention from the grinding sound and repetitive motion of the file.

  “Vampires, but not vampires, ghoulies, and ghosts, and the fucking wolfman. What do I need to be scared enough of to protect myself from?” If there was shit out there worse than that voodoo cunt, I wanted to know about it because, sure as shit, I’d piss it off one day.

  “I don’t have inside knowledge of the universe in its entirety. Aside from what you see here and tidbits of the occult, I really can’t speak for anything else. Not enough to provide you knowledge as protection. Except the wolfman; that’s a load of bullshit.” He flicked his hand as if to poo-poo the idea.

  “And what you are.” I didn’t give a shit about tact; he had answers and I wanted them.

  He closed his eyes and pinched his lips between his teeth. Dominika looked up from her file and red nails, her cobalt-blue eyes darting back and forth from me to Cyrus and back again. “What I am is of no consequence at this moment. That is a conversation intended for another setting.” His eyes flashed to Mike and back to me. If it wasn’t Malcolm, it was Mike.

  If he plans on being a hard-ass, he’d better harden up.

  I dropped it on account of not wanting to deal with Mike’s innate questioning. “You’re a vampire, or whatever. Right? He’s one of the vampire guys, right?” Confused, Mike looked back and forth between us. We ignored him.

  Forget it, Donny; you're out of your element. “What about magic? Know anything about that?” I continued, wondering when Mike would start rambling about random Beatles lyrics. I am the Walrus.

  “Not enough.” He knew what I meant. He knew I intended to load up on my magical Flintstone Kids. He didn’t say a word about it, but I knew he wasn’t happy with what I was about to do. His eyes let me know that much. Those pretty green things slid down my neck and focused on the trinket which hung over my shirt and rested on my boobs then came back to meet mine.

  “What exactly do you know? Can you at least give me that?”

  “I know you’re in over your head,” he said, uncrossing his legs and leaning toward me.

  “Am I?”

  “Yes. I know you’re going to bury yourself deeper before you dig yourself out. I know you’re haunted by your exploits.” I didn’t know if he meant Tatum, or just a general fuckety case of PTSD. “I know you’re going to learn before too long to leave be what you don’t know. Knowledge is not always power.”

  “What do you know about power?” I jumped up to my overly defensive feet. “Malcolm treated you like shit. Like nonhuman garbage, and you let him. Marienne had to kill him to free you of his bullshit and allow you to become what you yourself said you were destined to be.” I pointed my scornful finger at his chest. “And in reality, she’s more of a bad ass, Primus boss-bitch than you are.” I jabbed my thumb in Dominika’s direction.

  Cyrus’s face was stone. He didn’t let his eyes even twitch in my direction. Dominika raised her perfectly plucked brows and nodded a few times before going back to her file and nails.

  His green eyes flicked in her direction and back to anywhere but at me again. He knew I was right. More importantly, it pissed him off. “It would serve you well to sit down,” he rumbled.

  “It would serve you well to shut your fucking blood hole.” Mike, in all his naive glory, flipped the leather strap, which held his service weapon in its holster open.

  Cyrus tensed through his shoulders and it became obvious quickly that a fight was on the horizon. Since I’d already caught the first act of that show, I decided it best for all parties to eliminate the problem.

  “It’s time for you to go.” I shoved at Mike’s shoulder.

  “Like hell. And leave you here with him.” He shoved his body into mine to point in the center of Cyrus’s chest, hard.

  Though I stood between them, meeting one chin and one chest, both threw a swing. My height saved my nose from a sock but it did nothing for being unwittingly trapped between two asshats intent on ruining my fucking day. “Fuck. Off.” I set my hands in each solar plexus and shoved with all my might.

  My gimpy arm zinged with pain. Both men stumbled slightly, not anything Stan Lee worthy, but enough to escape and throw them off their damn high horses. I’d had enough. I’d had enough of jealous, overbearing ex-boyfriends, was seriously tired of vampires and all their shit-sucking bullshit, and was downright fed the fuck up with everything not beer and DVR-related. And my Goddamned arm hurt.

  “Let’s go.” Mike pulled on my hand.

  I slipped my hand from his grip. “No. I’m not going anywhere. I’ve got fifteen more minutes and enough questions to fill that time over and over again. You, however, are going to work. You’ve taken your time to grieve for your friend. Now it’s time to take care of me the only way you can. Get your clue-hunting ass back to that office and find out where the investigation stands. Do what you promised to do.” I looked at him with raised brows, mentally reminding him of his
promise to keep my murderous ass out of the clink.

  Mike glared over the top of my curly head at Cyrus. I didn’t have to look to assume Cyrus wasn’t knitting a jaunty little sweater behind me. “Fine.” He looked down to me. “I’ll come see you tonight.” I didn’t argue; there was absolutely no point in it. “Be good.” He kissed me on the top of my head, but it was mostly his chin, like he was looking over me at someone else while he did it.

  The detective knew—he was a damn detective, after all— he didn’t even have half the truth. Honestly, his actions were one-hundred percent based on me, good, bad, or otherwise.

  “Bye,” I said to him.

  He waved over his head while he walked out the double doors. A sliver of sunshine slipped in for a second and bathed the entryway in light. It was a sad and sorry sight. Regardless of the mystique the building held, it was still a bar. The scuffs along the walls and the aging Berber carpet told that story well.

  I spun around with my arms folded under my boobs. If I hadn’t been wearing a t-shirt, my cleavage would have spilled out everywhere. “I don’t have time for your bullshit. I have two questions I need answered right now. Beyond that...” I shook my head and glanced around. “Looks like we’ll need privacy.”

  Cyrus bowed his head and waved his hand toward the empty chair for me to sit. “Your questions?”

  I took a deep breath and thought hard about which were my most important two. “If vampires are fiction, what is all of this? What is—was—Malcolm? And Marienne, and all the others I met at the summit?” It was hard to weigh which were more important, so I just went with the first I couldn’t leave not knowing.

  “They are animals. Just like you.”

  “And you.” I looked into his perfect olive eyes without any thoughts of looking away. Lopping heads off had made me kind of a bad ass, enough so I could thwart any naughty thoughts.

  He ignored my comment. “They live, they breathe, and they eat.”

  “This is not my second question, only an amendment to the first. What do they eat?”

  “Dominika can’t live without carne asada nachos from Maria’s down the street. But don’t tell.” He put his finger to his lips while she glared over his shoulder. Binge and purge? “They consume food like you and I. To survive as long as they have, they do require supplemental sustenance.”

  “Blood.”

  “Not exactly,” he shook his head.

  “Can you explain why I tumbled into barrels of the red shit if these assholes don’t need it?”

  “I didn’t say that. It’s not the blood they need. It’s the life.” I rolled my eyes. “Really. Most don’t even want it. And I’ve never met a one who would have any food need for that much blood.”

  “A one what? If they’re not vampires, then what are they?”

  “They don’t have a familial classification. Darwin never included them in his theories. Most similar lore would be the Upir or Strigoi, but even those are farfetched and mostly superstition. The community in which I have thrived belongs to a classification of animal, which have lived so deeply undercover in plain sight they have yet to be discovered. I suppose, for argument’s sake, we can call them vampires. They’ve accepted that as their official title anyway, regardless of the misconceptions it brings.”

  “Why don’t they just come out? It worked on HBO.” Those fuckers ran for office.

  He shook his head. “They would become test subjects before they would become citizens. You know this.” His face changed, and it seemed sad. “The emergence of the genre in the last few decades provided the perfect cover. Ensuring not a soul on Earth would be the wiser, a handful of ingenious entrepreneurs created this façade claiming to be vampires, recruiting eager humans to ensure proper cannon fodder, exposing the truth to only a select few. The plan ran without a hitch…well, perhaps a few hiccups, but overall perfection. In addition to the growing following, the community had built its own rules and had begun to police itself even on the lowest level. That was until a snarky little reporter started snooping around and brought prying eyes into the situation.” He cocked his brow at me as if to make it clear he was referring to me. “Eyes which could bring all we’ve built crashing down around us.”

  “I won’t publish this.” In all of his dodging, it had never occurred to me he was just as afraid of me as he was Malcolm. “I won’t,” I promised. I meant it.

  “Thank you,” Cyrus said cordially a second before Dominika sighed and left the room. I couldn’t tell if she was bored with the conversation or pissed that Cyrus had spilled the beans. I looked at the clock on my phone. “What they are is something I can’t explain scientifically. After so many years in their presence, I can tell you, just like humans, there are the good and there are the bad. Marienne Poisson was one of the bad. I can only imagine what centuries on this planet do to one’s moral compass.”

  Made sense. After just a few months with the tip of the iceberg I was dealing with, I’d nearly lost all emotional depth. Except maybe rage. “If not blood, then what?”

  “Energy. Everything in the universe is made of energy. Humans conduct a hundred watts of it just by living.”

  “What are their powers? Are we talking flight or just mind fucks?” I was pulling out every piece of vampy info I’d ever seen. Trust, but verify.

  “Neither. Just as with humans, talents take time to progress. With that many years’ practice, anyone could master anything within physical reason.”

  “One man’s reason is another man’s chaos,” I mumbled to myself.

  “See it as you will,” he shrugged.

  “So, this energy is what allows them to stay alive indefinitely?” I tried to squeak out as much information as I could before I had to book it.

  “Everything is finite. They are no different. They die, in time. Some fight it, like Marienne, taking their survival to extremes. With the amount of blood and the possibility of more cells.” He called them cells like he was CIA. “I can only imagine there are others with a similar agenda.”

  “The blood is supposed to keep them alive?”

  “Not forever, but for a while. Old blood lacks energy. I can only assume that’s where Azelie and her brother came in, somehow replenishing that. Drinking isn’t a necessity. Marienne was likely keeping her centuries’ old milky skin youthful by simply bathing in it. It’s not common, but I have heard of that tactic over the years. I can’t guarantee their motives, only my theories. “

  “If that’s true, there are more people out there collecting blood. Killing people.” My stomach sank. There had been too much death. All for some Oil of Old Bitch live-forever cure-all? Fucking snake oil salesmen murdering for a buck and a wrinkle-free smile.

  “I’m afraid so. If that’s the case, that is.”

  “I have to protect myself.” He nodded. He knew what I meant. “I don’t know what’s out there. How am I supposed to know Azelie’s death stopped anything? According to you, there are plenty of bad things out there to be worried about. Living and dead.” The small of my back tickled with beads of sweat under the warm steel I had shoved in my waistband.

  “I won’t stop you, but I ask that you think before you act. Please don’t forget you aren’t yet aware of all that is dark and deadly. Consider the world your enemy.”

  His tone was so ominous I had to ask. “What am I running from?”

  The double doors rattled with the loud thumps of a fist banging against it. “Time for running is over.” He stood to answer the door. “From here, all that is left is the fight.” He bent at the waist and kissed my head similar to Mike. “And me.” He left to answer the door.

  Light spilled in again and washed over everything. Cyrus’s silhouette stood in the bright doorway and another figure stood just in front of him. I couldn’t hear their conversation, but it sounded businessy. So, of course, I kindly eavesdropped. I stood and made my way toward the door as if I were waiting to leave.

  “Dylan,” Cyrus called to me from the door, “I’d like y
ou to meet the new head of security.” He moved and the figure who had stood outside made his way in. “Since Sam and Malcolm have left us, I had to shift around some staff and find a replacement.”

  “Hi,” the stalky man said and jutted out a meaty hand. I shook it curtly and felt sad all over again that sweet Sam had been such an asshole. “My name’s Luke,” Stalky said. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Aren’t you a little short for a storm trooper?” I mumbled dryly. He laughed and held on to my hand longer than was professional. I turned to Cyrus. The situation wasn’t as juicy as I’d originally hoped. “I’ve got to run.”

  “Be safe, please. And that thing you’ve got hidden under your shirt isn’t going to help you.”

  “Is it a tiny alien? That shit’s serious,” Luke joked. I laughed in my belly but didn’t let it come out in a sound.

  “I like this one.” I wagged my thumb in his direction and walked out into the sun. An hour ago, I’d have felt safer standing in the light. After learning there are awful little beasties hiding in every nook and cranny, I felt safe nowhere. “Try not to die, eh.” I patted the new security guy on his thick shoulder.

  I made my way past them and out into the light. The doors shut behind me and I wondered how long it would be until I would have to kill the poor kid for some unspeakable treachery. There was a chance he was one of the good guys, like me. Those days of good and bad, black and white, were gone. The lines between had been smudged with blood and mud. Luke may have been one of the good guys, but I sure as fuck wasn’t.

  I left Embrace hours before its dramatic ‘New Management’ reopening, but the show had already begun. Out front, two workers in black polo shirts and nametags hefted a large vinyl banner from their utility van toward the entrance. Even if I would’ve stayed behind and grilled Cyrus for hours about every last detail, it wouldn’t have mattered; he had his hands full with Primus bullshit. He said he’d be there, but that outlook appeared bleaker with each passing day.