Dead is the New Black Page 3

  “Sorry, lady, but some precautions I haff to take, ja?”

  His breath wafting a withering blast of garlic over me, old man Schneider shrugged in heavy unconcern as my fingers closed weakly over the bag. I felt Heath’s grip on my shoulder and took a staggering step away before turning back to wait for Brooklyn, then a different sensation rose up in me. As the hunger flooded through me for the third time that night, I shrugged off Heath’s steadying hand.

  “I’m okay,” I said thickly—and if you’re wondering why thickly, all I can say is you try talking when your eye-teeth are in the process of lengthening past your bottom lip. I gave up all pretence of politeness and sunk my canines into the plastic, ripping a jagged hole in one corner. “Just need to take a little nip of the good stuff here—”

  “Damn, it’s a setup!”

  Brooklyn’s words sent a chill of fear through me, but the hunger overrode all other emotions. I slurped down a mouthful of blood—

  Okay, let’s lay down some ground rules here before I go any further. Yes, I know how totally gross that last sentence sounded, and yes, I know there’s no way I can describe the taste or the smell or the exquisite sensations I felt while I was glugging back my happy snack of pig’s blood so that anyone who isn’t a vampire can understand—and by understand I basically mean not toss your cookies at the very thought. So you’re just going to have to take it on faith, the stuff was ambrosia to me. I didn’t even want to waste the part that was trickling down my chin, so as I reluctantly lowered my bag o’blood and met Brooklyn’s alarmed eyes I used the back of my hand to smear the spilled residue toward my mouth.

  “Setup?” I looked quickly about, but I couldn’t see anything that might have alerted her. “Who set us up and how?”

  Her gaze traveled coldly over me. “Shove the innocent act, Mata Hari, your cover’s blown. You shoulda kept the bad wig on, or at least stayed in the shadows. You’re Natashya Crosse, the sister of the Daughter and the Healer, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, she is, vamp. Wanna make something of it?”

  The measured challenge came from behind me. I whirled around, my heart sinking as I saw the two people I least wanted to encounter tonight.

  Megan—she was the one who’d spoken—was wearing your basic Daughter of Lilith black and carrying your basic Daughter of Lilith stake. Kat had never bought into the Healer-Nurturing-Soul-Mother look, so she was dressed as she always was, in something slinky and designer and drop-dead sexy. But their expressions as they looked at me were identical, and I suddenly felt like an old wino chugging from a bottle of Woolite.

  “Oh, sweetie, no,” Kat said, her husky voice breaking with appalled compassion.

  “Dammit, Tash, you told us you were controlling the hunger!” Megan accused.

  “They didn’t know you were here tonight?” Brooklyn’s tone lost its edge. She stepped in front of me and whipped out a tissue. “All down your freakin’ chin, babe,” she murmured as she dabbed at my face before turning to my sisters. “She is controlling it, and if you two weren’t such holier-than-thou bitches, you’d realize that,” she snapped.

  I didn’t see Megan’s and Kat’s reactions. I was too busy scanning the alleyway for Heath. He’d been beside me only a moment ago, and I hadn’t seen him leave.

  But he was gone. And at the far end of the alleyway I saw a bat rise swiftly over the rooftops and disappear.

  Chapter 3

  “Oh, shit. Heads up, Tashya—dude with weapon at five o’clock,” Brooklyn said under her breath as a figure detached itself from the shadows and moved to Kat’s side. Her eyes narrowed. “And is that a friggin’ wolf?”

  “Holier than thou?” Megan said ominously as her hand fell to the wolf’s silver-tipped black ruff. She kept her gaze on Brooklyn. “I guess we are at that, seeing as how you’re about to go straight to hell, vamp. Step away from her, Tash.”

  I heard a door slam and the sound of a dead bolt shooting into its lock. Glancing sideways, I saw old man Schneider had decided discretion was the better part of valor and had closed up shop for the evening. Which was understandable enough, since his clientele had melted away into the darkness during the past few seconds, leaving only me and Brooklyn and the muttering derelict Brook had called Crazy Joe, who’d returned and was now pawing through a garbage can, oblivious to the drama being enacted a few feet away from him. My humiliation at Megan and Kat finding me here was replaced by anger.

  “The dude with the nail gun that shoots silver-tipped nails is Kat’s ex-con main squeeze, Jack Rawls. And the wolf’s a shapeshifter named Mikhail. Rumor has it Megan lets him sleep on her bed if he’s been a good dog,” I told Brooklyn, loudly enough for Megan to hear. I switched my attention to my sisters. “No one’s going to hell tonight, Meg,” I declared. “I hear you’ve patrolled this alley before, so you know damn well that the vamps who come here don’t feed off humans. Take your pointy stick and go home, and tell the rest of your little gang they’re not wanted, either. That includes you, Kat.”

  “There’s no such thing as a vamp that doesn’t feed off humans.” Beside Kat, Jack’s finger tightened on the nail gun’s trigger. “Only vamps that haven’t fed off humans yet.”

  “Sweetie, you know your killer instinct’s one of the things I adore about you, but you’re aiming at my little sister,” Kat drawled. “If you dust her I’ll hunt you to the ends of the earth, so dial it down, comprendes? Megan, Tash was just being her usual bratty self with that remark about Mikhail. Lower your stake before Darkheart gets here.”

  “Grandfather’s with you?” I thrust my bag of blood at Brooklyn, almost spilling it in my agitation. “Take this. No, don’t just hold it in front of you for everyone to see, stash it somewhere!”

  She stared at me. “What’s with you? Your big sisters show up and ten seconds later you’re emotional wreckage?”

  “They’re only my big sisters by a matter of minutes,” I said distractedly. “We’re triplets. Just hide the blood, okay, Brook? Kat, I can’t believe you let Megan do this! I’ll bet I know what this is about—our Daughter of Lilith sister’s decided I’m not pulling my weight at Darkheart & Crosse and she’s trying to get me booted from the agency. But since she doesn’t have the guts to Trump me herself, she accidentally-on-purpose arranged for Grandfather Darkheart to see how far down Vamp Avenue I’ve travelled in the past few weeks so he has to tell me I’m fired! All I can say is that when Grammie and Popsie finally come home, you two are going to be in major shit, so there!”

  My arms folded across my chest in triumph, I turned to Brooklyn. “Darkheart & Crosse was my brainwave,” I informed her. “After Zena got dusted I figured there’d be a need for an agency that specialized in vampire-related investigations, and I was totally right, but since Megan became a Daughter it’s all about her. She can’t stand that the business I thought up is threatening to overshadow her Daughter of Lilith activities.” I waited for Brooklyn’s reaction but when it came it wasn’t what I’d expected.

  “Too bad, babe.” In her ice-green eyes I saw a glimmer of something that looked like disappointment. She held out my bag of blood. “I’m outta here.”

  “So am I,” I said, glancing defiantly in Megan’s direction. “You want to hit an after-hours club together, maybe see if we can find a couple of interesting guys? Or in your case, girl,” I amended.

  “I thought I had,” Brooklyn said. “Looks like I was wrong. Stay out of the sunlight, Mata Hari.” She turned to go, but then she hesitated. “I sometimes wonder why I got vamped, you know? Like why me, a nice Jewish girl who was good to her Bubbe, kind to small children, only bought lattes made from fair-trade coffee beans? Hell, I’ve got a sister, too—a twin, and except that she’s straight the two of us could be clones. Yet I got turned and Xandra didn’t. I haven’t figured it out yet.” She shrugged. “But if life’s supposed to be more than just a series of random shitstorms, maybe the reason why you received this fun bonus from fate is because being a vamp is your only chance of becoming a real person. I really hope that happens for you, babe. Vamp or not, the little I saw of who you could be was a hell of a lot more intriguing than the bratty younger sister of the Daughter and the Healer.”

  In my own defence, I’d like to point out that it had been a long night, what with chickening out of killing myself, playing tug-of-rat with a cat and nearly getting bitten by Stud-Tongue. Not to mention receiving a wicked uppercut to my jaw from my new best friend, finding and losing the man of my fantasies and having my sisters discover I’d progressed to drinking blood. All in all, I wasn’t in the mood to thank Brook for her assessment of me and thoughtfully ask myself if any of what she’d said could be true. I was more in the mood to yell the meanest things I could think of at her as she walked away from me.

  Which is what I did, and to this day I wish I could call back the words I flung after her.

  “You mean I won’t have to think of a polite way to tell you I don’t appreciate being pawed on the slightest pretext by another woman, babe?” I gave a short laugh. “News flash, Punk-girl—that’s not a tragedy, that’s a relief! Even if I were gay, you’re so not my type, with that dark-root look you’ve got going with your hair and that Salvation Army look you’ve got going with your clothes!” I raised my voice as she slipped into the shadows between two buildings and disappeared from my view without ever having looked back. “And another thing—”

  Something brushed against my hair and fell to my shoulders. Startled, I looked down at myself and saw the starry shapes of small, white flowers against the black of my trenchcoat. Then the nausea hit me, ten times more powerfully than it had in reaction to old man Schneider’s garlic breath, and I realized what the flowers were.

  “Wild garlic!” I choked the words out as I fell to my knees. “Get it off me!”

  “Is unfortunate necessity, Granddaughter.” As the Russian-accented words reached my ears, my blurred vision made out the bulky shape of a caped figure reeling in the excess length of his wild-garlic lasso as he approached me. “Do not worry, this is not trap to stake you,” he said with hearty reassurance.

  “Tha’s…good to know…” I mumbled as I pitched face-forward onto the ground and lost consciousness at Darkheart’s feet.

  “It’s worse than we thought.” As I struggled upward through the fog surrounding me, I heard Kat’s worried voice coming from a long way away. “She keeps her shoes in a plastic garbage bag—Manolos, Jimmy Choos, all jumbled up together in a big pile! How could she?”

  “What more proof do we need that she’s totally deteriorated? And if you think that’s bad, take a look at what I found under her bed, covered with dust bunnies.” Megan didn’t sound worried, she sounded pissed off. “My cream Chanel jacket, the one she swore she hadn’t borrowed.”

  “Refrigerator is disaster area. Bag of stale doughnuts, two cartons take-out Chinese food, old slices pizza. In cupboards are cookies and candy bars.” The fog around me lifted enough for me to hear Darkheart sigh heavily. “Is typical symptom. She fights blood hunger but other cravings come upon her.”

  They’d brought me to my own apartment, I realized, and while I’d been dead to the world my sisters and my grandfather—I couldn’t hear Mikhail or Jack, so I assumed they’d been left on patrol—had been searching the place. Outrage flickered in me but I still felt too lethargic to move.

  “You mean she gets the munchies?” Kat’s tone went from worried to appalled. “The poor sweetie, she’s going to blimp out if she keeps this up. Honestly, Meg, if I can’t attempt a Heal on my own sister—”

  Her words were like an icy wind blowing the last of my grogginess away. I sat bolt upright, realizing as I did that I was no longer bound by Darkheart’s garlic lasso, and the next moment I was racing across the room to the window that looked out onto the metal fire escape. I was steps away from it when I saw the wreath tacked to the sill, its starry white flowers wafting their deadly scent toward me. I changed direction in mid-dash and made for the door, only to see another garlic wreath festooning that escape route. Blindly I headed for my bedroom. The window by my bed didn’t open onto a handy fire escape, it looked out over the Dumpster that had been the scene of my embarrassing tussle with Bojangles, but although I hadn’t been able to bring myself to jump from St. Jude’s bell tower earlier this evening I thought I could manage a three-story drop into a pile of reeking refuse.

  Given what the alternative was.

  I came to a screeching halt. Megan was standing in the bedroom doorway, her stake in her hand. “You wouldn’t, Meg,” I said hollowly.

  She looked thoughtful. “Probably not, brat. But do you really want to find out?”

  “Sweetie, calm down.” I spun around to see Kat advancing on me, her perfect features shadowed with compassion. “As Darkheart said, we’re not planning a staking. This little get-together’s more along the lines of a—”

  “Stay away from me, Kat!” I hissed, shrinking from her. In chagrin I realized my fangs were lengthening, and I tried to keep my top lip immobile—a look that might have worked for Humphrey Bogart, but which I was pretty sure wasn’t working for me. “I know what this is! It’s an intervention, and you can forget it—I’m not risking an attempted Heal unless you can guarantee it won’t go bad, sending me straight to hell and eternal damnation. But you can’t guarantee that, can you?”

  Kat tossed a swath of silver-blond hair from her shoulders. I could see she was trying to hold on to her I’m-a-Healer-so-I-feel-love-for-all-living-things-even-the-undead serenity and fighting a sisterly impulse to snap at me. “Merde, sweetie, that’s only happened a handful of times in the whole history of Healing, and when it has it’s usually—”

  “It’s usually been when the prospective Healee bears the mark of a Queen Vampyr,” I broke in. “Hmmm…who do we know like that? Oh, that’s right—me!”

  I was backing away from her as I spoke, but I froze when I felt something sharp in my back, just below my left shoulderblade. I kept my gaze straight ahead. “Stake?”

  “Yup,” Megan agreed from behind me. “I told you two she’d make a piss-poor candidate,” she said laconically to Darkheart and Kat. “Face it, Kat, we’ve always known our little sister’s got a few tiny character flaws, starting with being spoiled, self-involved and immature. Even her punky vamp friend’s figured her out. I say we drop this ridiculous plan.”

  Her character assassination of me aside, I told myself, Megan was arguing my case for me. I should probably keep my mouth shut. Ignoring my own advice, I turned around and glared at her. “Ever since you’ve taken on the role of a Daughter of Lilith you’ve been a royal pain in the butt, Meg. You’re the self-involved one!”

  “Really?” she said thinly. “Tell me, when you did your midnight flit from the Crosse mansion last week after we got that letter from Cyrus Kane, did it occur to you that we’d be worried sick when we found you gone? We wasted three patrol nights tracking you down to this crappy apartment and when we did I wanted to read you the riot act for scaring us the way you did, but Dark-heart—” she nodded at Grandfather, who remained silent “—insisted we give you time to adjust to the realization that you were the one Zena marked when we were babies.”

  “Of all the ingratitude!” I sputtered. “You’re on my case because I left home before I—” I stopped abruptly and Megan’s gaze narrowed.

  “Before you what?”

  Before I killed you and Kat, I told her silently. Before I slaughtered Darkheart and Mikhail and Jack. Before the hunger became stronger than I could handle, the way it almost did tonight. Once upon a time I would have blurted out the truth to her, I thought, taking in the firm line of her mouth, the hard steadiness that hadn’t been in her gaze before she’d become a Daughter. But now I couldn’t know for sure if she’d react to my confession as a sister…or as the sworn enemy of me and my kind.

  “Before I went out of my mind with boredom,” I said with a shrug. “I mean, things around here are getting so same old, same old. First Zena shows up in Maplesburg and you stake her, then Kane shows up and Kat Heals him—and by the way, Kat,” I added in an aside, “Cyrus fleeing to the ends of the earth all tortured with guilt over his evil past and dying in a Buddhist monastery isn’t the most reassuring demonstration of the benefits of a Heal. No wonder you don’t have vamps lining up to take advantage of the oh-so-special gift you inherited from Daddy Dearest.”

  “Firstly, Kane didn’t die from being Healed, he was murdered,” Kat said sharply. “And the vamp that infiltrated the monastery and killed him was the same one he tried to warn us about in the letter the monks forwarded to us after his death—Lady Jasmine Melrose, the bitch who turned him centuries ago right here in Maplesburg. Secondly, what’s with the ‘Daddy Dearest’ merde? Finding out that there’s a possibility our father didn’t die twenty years ago when Zena targeted Angelica should have made you as happy as it did Megan and me, but ever since we read that postscript to Kane’s letter—”

  “‘David Crosse lives’,” I quoted impatiently. “And it wasn’t Kane’s postscript, it was tacked onto the end of his letter by Jasmine, along with her heads-up to us about how she’s coming to Maplesburg. But she hasn’t shown up here, has she? And if her news-flash about Daddy Dearest was true, why hasn’t he contacted us in all these years?”

  “That’s what Gospodin Darkheart has requested me to find out. My family’s business contacts in former Soviet Socialist Republic have spent past week questioning peasants in mountainous Carpathian region in attempt to learn what happened to David Crosse after night when Zena left him for dead. Trail is understandably cold after so long and so far is few results, but still is hope we will learn something.”