Karen Moning - Bloodfever

I needed answers. I was sick of not getting any. I was surrounded by egotistical, unpredictable, moody, pushy jackasses, and my feeling was if you can’t beat them, join them. I was confident I, too, could be a pushy jackass. I just needed a little practice.

I wanted to know more about Barrons. I wanted to know if he lived in this building or not. I wanted to know more about his mysterious garage. He’d slipped up not long ago, and mentioned something about a vault three floors beneath it. I wanted to know what a man like him stored in an underground vault.

I began with the store. The front half was just what it seemed, an eclectic and well-stocked bookstore. I dismissed it and moved to the rear half. The first floor was as impersonal as a museum, liberally and exorbitantly fitted with antiquities and artwork, but nothing that betrayed any real glimpse into the mind of the man who’d acquired the many artifacts. Even his study, the one room I expected to offer some personal portrayal of the man, presented only the cool, impersonal reflection of a large wood-framed mirror that occupied the wall between cherry bookcases, behind the ornate fifteenth-century desk. There was no bedroom, kitchen, or dining room on the first floor.

Every door on the second and third floors was locked. They were heavy, solid wood doors with complicated locks that I couldn’t force or pick. I started out stealthily jiggling the doorknobs because I was afraid Barrons might be in one of the rooms, but by the time I got to the third floor, I was giving them good hard shakes and pissed-off kicks. I’d awakened tonight to find myself in the dark. I was tired of being in the dark. I was tired of everyone else having control of the lights.

I stomped back downstairs and outside to the garage. The rain had abated but the sky was still dark with thunderclouds, and dawn was a promise I wouldn’t have believed, if I’d not lived through twenty-two years of them. Down the alley to my left, Shades restlessly shaped and reshaped the darkness at the edge of the abandoned neighborhood.

I flipped them off. With both hands.

I tested the garage door. Locked, of course.

I went to the nearest blacked-out window and smashed it in with the butt of my flashlight. The tinkle of breaking glass soothed my soul. No alarm went off. “Take that, Barrons. Guess your world isn’t so perfectly controlled, after all.” Perhaps it was warded like the bookstore, against other threats, not me. I broke out the jagged edges so I wouldn’t get cut, hoisted myself over the sill, and dropped to the floor.

I flipped on the light switches by the door then just stood there a minute, grinning like an idiot. I’ve seen his collection before, even ridden in a few of the cars, but the sight of them all together, one gleaming fantasy after another, is a total rush to somebody like me.

I love cars.

From sleek and sporty to squat and muscley, from luxury sedan to high-performance coupe, from state-of-the-art to timeless classic, I am a car fanatic—and Barrons has them all. Well, maybe not all . I haven’t seen him driving a Bugatti yet, and really, with 1003 horsepower and a million-dollar price tag, I’m hardly expecting to, but he’s got pretty much every car of my dreams, right down to a sixty-four and a half Stingray, painted what else but British racing green?

There, a black Maserati crouched next to a Wolf Countach. Here, a red Ferrari stretched on the verge of a purr, next to a—my smile died instantly—Rocky O’Bannion’s Maybach, reminding me of sixteen deaths that shouldn’t have happened to men who hadn’t deserved to die, and at least part of it was on my head: sixteen deaths I’d celebrated because they’d bought me a temporary stay of execution.

Where do you put such conflicting feelings? Is this where I’m supposed to grow up and start compartmentalizing? Is compartmentalizing just another way of divvying up our sins, apportioning a few here and a few over there, shoving our internal furniture around to hide some, so we can go on living with the weight of them individually, because collectively they’d drown us?

I shoved all thought of cars from my mind and began looking for doors.

The garage had once been some kind of commercial warehouse, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it occupied nearly a city block. The floors were polished concrete, the walls poured concrete, the beams and girders steel. All the windows were painted black, from the glass-block apertures near the ceiling, to the two double-paned glass openings at ground level by the doors, one of which I’d busted. The garage had a single retractable dock door.

Other than that and a bunch of cars, there was nothing. No stairs, no closets, no trapdoors hidden beneath rubber mats on the floor. I know, I looked, there was nothing.

So where were the three subterranean levels and how was I supposed to get down to them?

I stood in the center of the enormous garage surrounded by one of the finest car collections in the world, tucked away in a nondescript alley in Dublin, and tried to think like its bizarre owner. It was an exercise in futility. I wasn’t sure he had a brain. Perhaps there was only a coldly efficient microchip in there.

I felt more than heard the noise, a rumble in my feet.

I cocked my head, listening. After a moment, I got down on my hands and knees, brushed a thin veneer of dust from the floor, and pressed my ear to the cold concrete. Far beneath me, in the marrow of the ground, something bayed.

It sounded maddened, bestial, and it raised the fine hair all over my body. I closed my eyes and tried to picture the mouth capable of making such a sound. It bayed over and over, each soul-chilling howl lasting a full minute or more, echoing up from its concrete tomb.

What was down there? What kind of creature possessed such lung capacity? Why was it making such a sound? It was darker than a wail of despair, emptier than a funeral dirge; it was the bleak, tortured baying of a thing beyond salvation, abandoned, lost, condemned to the agony of hell without beginning or end.

Chicken flesh sprouted all over my arms.

There was a new cry then, this one more terrified than tortured. It rose in gruesome concert with that long, terrible howl.

They both stopped.

There was silence.

I rapped my knuckles on the floor in frustration, wondering just how far in over my head I was.

No longer feeling quite so jackassy or pushy, I left to go back to my room. As I stepped into the alley, the wind scooted trash along the pavement, and the dense cloud cover drifted apart to reveal a window of dark sky. Dawn was moments away, yet the moon was still bright and full. To my right, in the Dark Zone, Shades no longer crouched in the shadows. They’d fled something, and it wasn’t the moon or the dawn. I’d watched them a lot from my window lately; they ceded the night in petulant degrees, the largest of them lingering until the last.

I glanced to my left and sucked in a breath.

“No,” I whispered.

Just beyond reach of the building floodlights a tall, black-shrouded figure stood, folds of midnight cloth rustling in the wind.

Several times over the past week, I’d thought I’d glimpsed something out a window, late at night. Something so trite and clichéd that I’d refused to believe it was real. And I wouldn’t now.

Fae were bad enough.

“You’re not there,” I told it.

I dashed across the alley, vaulted up the stairs, kicked open the door, and burst through it. When I looked back, the specter was gone.

I laughed shakily. I knew better.

It had never been there to begin with.

I took a shower, dried my hair, got dressed, grabbed a chilled latte from the fridge, and made it downstairs just in time for Fiona to show up, and the police to arrive to arrest me.