Unchained, page 3
“I’m not a witch anymore.”
He gave her a look, grabbed the musket, and slipped into the darkness. Swearing, Ashe ran to catch up. The entrance to the staircase was on the other side of the tall spire of rock, forcing them to circle its base. The colored lights that illuminated the flower beds dwindled, then stopped as soon as they left the footpath. Ashe tripped, nearly going down on one knee before she bumped into Reynard.
He steadied her, and she could feel the remnants of magic clinging to Reynard’s long, strong fingers. But there was more than that; she felt power spilling over her like sand in a windstorm, stinging in a thousand tiny bites. Whoever—whatever—had been shooting at them was hurt, and not human.
She thought again about her daughter and knew fear.
Reynard took a step forward. Ashe grabbed his arm. “You had only one shot in your musket. I should go first.”
He pulled what looked like a very modern Smith & Wesson—it was hard to tell in the dark—from a holster hidden at the small of his back. “I could reload. I also carry a backup. As Mac is so fond of saying, shit happens.”
The obscenity sounded wrong coming from him. Of course, every assumption she’d made about him so far that night had been off base. Not a good thing when they were supposed to be covering each other’s backs.
Reynard started up the stairs, showing just how good his night vision was. Ashe brought up the rear. There was an iron railing to her right, but that was her gun hand, so she left it alone. Her skin crawled, not just with power but with vertigo. Normally she didn’t mind heights, but all that changed when she couldn’t see where she was putting her feet. She felt for the steps and counted each one. Good to know how many steps she’d climbed in case she had to reverse course in a hurry. Thinking you were at the bottom of the pitch-dark stairs when you weren’t could be a problem.
More plants and bushes grew on the rock spire. Leaves brushed her face like slick, green fingers. They reached the landing, where the stairs took a sharp turn. Overhead was a wash of stars, thick and bright because the gardens were outside the city. Above the canopy of trees, the waxing moon gave a thin wash of light. Ashe saw Reynard hold up his left hand, then point. His right hand was curled around his weapon. Ashe grasped her own gun in both hands, reassured by its cold, heavy weight.
They went up the last dozen stairs. At the top was a kidney-shaped platform surrounded by an iron railing. It was like another small garden. The flower bed, maple tree, and bench would have been lovely in daylight. At night, the scene was eerie.
Reynard turned right and swept his gun downward to point at the fallen shooter. Ashe aimed at the figure sprawled facedown on the ground. He was twisted as if an effort to duck had spun him around.
Vampire. Now that she was close, Ashe could almost taste his essence. His energy was pouring needles of power over her like the skitter of insect feet on her skin. She glided to the left of the figure, Reynard to the right, until they stood on opposite sides of their quarry.
What happened next depended entirely on the vamp. Why had he shot at her? She wanted an explanation. She’d be happy to keep him alive—vibrantly undead?—at least long enough to question him. Longer if he played nice. Then again, he’d tried to kill her already. If he attacked, there’d be no messing around.
The vamp was male, medium height, dressed in jeans. A scatter of weapons and a tripod were strewn around him. She smelled blood, but saw only a shining stain on the back of his jacket. It was too dark to see color. He was motionless, but still she kicked his rifle out of reach. It was a sniper’s piece with all the fancy fixings.
“Weapon says he meant business,” she said softly.
“It seems your enemies put forward their best efforts,” Reynard replied.
“I’m so flattered.” Ashe took another quick inventory of the vamp. Short leather boots. The glint of a fancy watch. Dark hair, collar length. “Y’know, at first I wondered why someone would shoot from a place with only one escape route.”
As she spoke, she shifted the Colt to her left hand and reached into the pocket that ran up the outside of her right thigh. Familiarity washed through her. Slaying wasn’t her happy place, but it was one she knew inside and out. And it was the place where a bad guy ceased to be a “he” and became an “it.” It was easier to take them out if they weren’t a person.
Ashe pulled out a long, straight, sharp stake. “Then it came to me. Vamps can fly. And then I thought of another thing. I was called out here on an emergency. How did an assassin know where I’d be? Somebody’s been doing some planning, and I’m going to want names.”
The vampire struck. The speed was breathtaking, lifting it from a facedown sprawl to a frontal attack in less than a second—but she’d been expecting that. Ashe felt the thing’s body pound into the stake, and she used its own momentum to drive the weapon home. All she had to do was brace her feet against all that brute force and lean in.
The vamp flailed its arms, trying to change direction and pull away, trying to slash and bite and escape all at once. She’d judged the vamp’s height fairly well, but the stake had entered just below its heart. Ashe felt her feet skid on the stone beneath her, sliding far too close to the iron railing and the sheer drop beyond.
Reynard yelled, grabbing the vamp from behind. In a flash of moonlight, she could see the vampire’s face—features twisted in pain and rage. Reynard was managing to pin its arms, something no human should have been able to do. That seemed to scare the monster even more than the stake.
Ashe twisted her weapon, driving upward. The vampire gasped. She stopped a smidgen away from skewering it, praying Reynard’s strength would hold. She was taking a risk, pausing like this, but a chance at information was worth it.
She could feel his—its—breath on her skin, catch the faint, sweet smell of its venom. A vampire’s poison was so addictive, its erotic high made its victims slaves after just one bite.
“Why were you shooting at me?” she demanded.
It bared fangs, giving a rattling hiss.
“Scary, but I’ve seen better,” she said.
Reynard did something that made the vampire wince. “Answer.”
“Abomination!” it snarled, and gave one last lunge at her.
“Last” being the operative term. Ashe slammed the stake upward just before its fangs could reach her flesh. She heard the snap of its teeth as they closed on air.
The vampire was suddenly deadweight. Reynard let the body drop, wood still protruding from its chest.
Ashe looked down at the vampire. She knew she would feel plenty later—anger, triumph, regret, pity, self-justification—but at the moment she was blank. She’d done what she had to do. Once the adrenaline wore off, the rest could engulf her.
The vampire had called her an abomination. She opened her mouth to comment on how strange that was, coming from a bloodsucking monster, but closed it again. There were other, more pressing questions—like why had the vamp chosen to die rather than talk?
It could be vengeance. It could be something else. Whatever it was, it was personal. That thought made her queasy.
“Are you all right?” Reynard asked.
“Yeah,” Ashe said, keeping her voice light. “It went down easily enough.”
Reynard sat down on the bench, head bowed. Ashe looked away. He looked glum, but skewering the enemy wasn’t a cheery kind of thing. And then again, you didn’t get into this kind of work to talk about your feelings.
Ashe turned to lean on the railing. Below was the garden, bathed in starlight. A much better view than the vampire. The body had already started to shrivel. In about twenty minutes, it would be a pile of dust. It was like time caught up with the vamps, grinding them to nothing. Once the corpse was gone, they would search the vamp’s possessions for clues.
Above, the stars glittered like sequins on a torch singer’s evening gown. Below, the gardens glowed like a fairy kingdom. It seemed distant and surreal, a pretty mirage she could look at but not touch. She was made from a different element—something far less appealing.
At some point along the way, when her parents died, or when her husband died, or maybe when she’d bagged her first monster, Ashe had let herself slide into the darkness. Now that her daughter was home, she had to snap out of it. Kids needed a bright, shiny world. Eden needed something besides a monster-slaying action figure for a mom. Too bad Ashe didn’t know how to be anything else.
She would try. Goddess knew she would try. She would strive to see the beauty in the world and look away from the shadows. It was her duty as a parent.
She heard Reynard shift on the bench behind her.
“You should come see the view,” she said.
“No, thank you.” His voice was quiet. The dark made it oddly intimate.
“Why not?”
He was silent for a few heartbeats. “I have to go back to the Castle.”
“So?” She turned, leaning against the rail to face him.
He raised his head but didn’t meet her eyes. “Whatever I see out here will make me restless, and I don’t have a choice about going back. It’s best I see as little as possible.”
There was so much regret in the words, it bruised her. Regret—that she knew. She could almost taste it like coppery blood on her tongue, sharp and familiar.
Now, finally, there was something about him that she understood.
And, Goddess help her, she suddenly wanted to fix it.
Chapter 3
“This is Errata Jones at CSUP, the station that defines the supernatural in the beautiful city of Fairview. It’s eleven-oh-seven, just after the late news, and we’re back to talk some more about what the presence of the Castle in our town means for us.
“The new warden of the Castle—that would be our very own ex-police detective Conall ‘Mac’ Macmillan—has been hiring locals for guards, and a number of our Fairview boys have signed on.
“Well, girls and ghouls, that sounds like a great way to earn money and meet interesting people, doesn’t it? But I’d still ask a few questions before picking up my staff ID card. My sources have learned that, up until this recent hiring spree, the last man to join the guardsmen was Captain Reynard, back in 1758. Why did recruiting stop for two and a half centuries? And why do we so rarely see the guards outside the Castle walls? After that long, you’d think those guys would want a breath of fresh air.
“So, what exactly are our poor mortal lads getting themselves into? Once they’re in, there’s a confidentiality clause that forbids the guardsmen from talking to us. What doesn’t the Castle administration want us to know?”
* * *
Inside the Castle, Reynard found himself alone. He paused, letting the portal drift shut behind him. It closed with a faint popping noise that reminded him of smacking lips. The Castle had swallowed him up again.
He straightened his clothes, dusting mud from his sleeve. The light was low enough that his eyes barely needed to adjust from the dark outside. The area where he stood was a round, empty chamber, chosen because it was large enough to corral and capture the rabbit-like creature. Like most of the Castle, it was built of rough gray stone and lit by ever-burning torches that cast barely more than a flickering orange glow. He had expected to find some of his fellow guardsmen, but apparently they had bagged their quarry and left.
Well, he’d done his part already. As captain of the guardsmen who patrolled this section of the Castle, he had gone into the world and recaptured an escaped prisoner—just as he’d done a thousand times before. And, he would do it a thousand times more. His duty ended only if he was killed or the otherworldly magic of the Castle prison wound down. These retrievals were his only break in routine.
One would think he’d welcome them. Instead, he hated to leave because then he was obliged to return. It was a cruel thing to taste freedom for only a few hours.
The Castle robbed him of much—hunger, thirst, lust, joy—as part of the ancient magic that prevented overpopulation by the inmates or the gobbling up of weaker species. Perversely, anger and bitterness remained. The Castle had little love, but much war.
In contrast, the outside world sharpened appetite after decades of nothingness. Sensation—the scent of grass, the wind against his cheek—vibrated in his bones like colors long forgotten, clinging a moment before they crumbled into the dust of memory.
Desire, so heady minutes ago, still clung to his imagination. He envisioned Ashe Carver’s body under his, warm and female, the spice of thyme washing around them. She was strong, but no match for a guardsman. He could think of a thousand ways he’d like to show her that strength. He savored the hunger, imprinting it on his mind before it, too, fell to cobwebs.
Reynard had a reputation for iron discipline. Few considered why it might be necessary, or what would happen if that self-restraint slipped. On the other hand, he remembered who and what he’d been before he got there: angry, womanizing, a gambler, a duelist, and every other hazard a debutante’s mama might think to warn her baby chick against. That man was long gone, but every so often he felt that devil stir.
He wiped the light sweat that clung to his face and started walking down the corridor, barely bothering to look around him. There were no windows, no views of another landscape. There was only an inside to the Castle, an endless maze of shadowed corridors and vaulted rooms. The stone dungeon had lost its novelty value approximately two and a half centuries ago, but what could one expect from an eternal curse? From what he could tell, curses all began with great fanfare but were one-note songs. Eventually, they faded to the background, like a ticking clock: doomed, damned, doomed, damned.
A crashing bore, really.
From a chamber or two away he heard Mac singing—if it could be described as such—at the top of his lungs, “Kill the wa-a-a-a-abbit!”
Despite himself, Reynard smiled. Mac had been a human officer of the law, become a fire demon, and now described himself as head of Castle operations. There was much to admire—courage, loyalty, and a shrewd mind. There was also much about him that puzzled Reynard.
“Kill the waaabbit!”
Puzzled him a lot.
Reynard turned the corner. Mac was in a small room to the left, writing on the duty roster he had pinned to the wall. Mac was large—a head taller than Reynard and bulky with muscle. He was wearing the same modern clothes many of the outsiders wore—jeans and a T-shirt that left his tattooed forearms bare. But Mac was no outsider. He was as close to a friend as Reynard had known for at least a hundred years.
“Did you kill the wabbit—er—rabbit?” Reynard asked. “I thought you merely wanted to recapture it.”
Mac gave him scandalized eyes—an odd look, since they held a glint of demonic fire. “Of course I didn’t kill it. We took it back to its habitat. Some idiot had left the gates open.”
“Then why are you singing about putting the creature to death?”
“I’m quoting Elmer Fudd.”
“One of your modern poets?”
A look crossed Mac’s face. “Not really.”
“Do I surmise that this is one of those cultural gaps no amount of explanation will close?”
“You got it.”
Reynard could hear the hubbub of the guards’ mess hall a short distance away. Since Mac had arrived, the anti-appetite magic had been reduced in the quarters of the men. Something close to a normal, noisy, messy life had returned—at least for the new recruits. For the old guard, as he’d said to Ashe, things never changed. They were subject to the Castle’s laws, but there was other, additional magic that ruled them—spells that denied them any benefits from Mac’s kindlier regime.
Reynard could smell the oily stink of roasting meat and hear the muted babble of one of those television devices. He edged a few inches away from the sound. They had a way of hypnotizing a man. He’d find himself wasting hours unless he was cautious, lost in images of things he could never have or do.
“How was the trip?” Mac asked.
“It was successful.”
“That much I got from the sofa-sized rabbit hurtling through the portal.”
Mac made a notation on a clipboard that hung on the wall, using a mechanical pencil leashed to the board with string. As if that would stop a thief. The Castle residents were notorious for stealing pens, flashlights, and anything else that was new. Such small wonders were as candy to children. Try as he might to ignore modern fripperies, even Reynard knew about smartphones and laptops. And—he was ashamed to admit—he had been known to carry off the occasional roll of duct tape. That stuff could be used for everything.
Mac glanced up from writing. “What I’m asking is whether you enjoyed your trip.”
“It is better if I do not enjoy myself. It makes returning all the harder.”
“Ever hear of the concept of vacation?”
“It’s different for us.” Reynard had seen soldiers go mad once they reached the open air, throwing civilization aside like barbarians sacking a town. “Killion left on a mission and killed five farmers before we took his head. At the end, he was babbling about too much open space.”
“I think he was at the extreme end of the sanity bell curve.”
“Killion was not an isolated case.”
“You think your head would explode if you took a few weeks for yourself? Everyone deserves time off. I mean, it’s up to you, but you’re not one of the men I worry about.”
“Thank you, but no.”
Reynard thrust the idea aside before it could infect him. He liked to say he had two and a half centuries of overdue leave, but Mac didn’t understand. As capable as he was, there were things he didn’t know about the Castle.
The old guards had their secrets. There was a reason they never left their posts.
One of the newcomers walked by, pierced and tattooed, with a chain-mail shirt, leather kilt, stainless-steel coffee mug, and Doc Martens. He waved a hand at Reynard. “Hey, there, Cap’n.”
“Stewart.” Reynard nodded, overlooking the easy familiarity of the boy. Like the other new recruits, Stewart was a mere puppy, full of jokes and fun. Mac hired men as good with people as they were with weapons.
