Katie MacAlister: Much Ado About Vampires

“Damn,” I whispered to my knees, and consigned my soul to heaven.

Heaven, it seemed, didn’t want me. I realized this when the furious, frightening man stalked past me toward the man with whom I’d collided, the same man who was even now trying desperately to wrench open the front door.

“You dare steal from me!”

The powerful man’s voice was as terrible as a nightmare, shrill and piercing little bits of my soul, making it feel as if it were being ripped from me.

“I would never do anything so heinous, Lord Bael,” the other man said, dropping to his knees in a penitent position when he realized the door wouldn’t open. “It was my master. He covets your tools, not I.”

“Your master is a dead man,” the one named Bael said, his words wrapped in such horrible tones, I didn’t for one minute doubt the veracity of the prophecy. “What is your name?”

“Ulfur, my lord.”

I watched the scene with terrified amazement. Was the powerful man named Bael some sort of a peer? He had a British accent, so maybe he was some visiting dignitary. I wracked my brain trying to remember who owned this house before it got tangled up in probate. Maybe the Bael person was the owner? If that was so, why hadn’t he contacted the agency to let us know he was going to be present for the initial inspection?

“Who is your master?”

“Alphonse de Marco.”

“I do not know this name. Where are my tools?”

“I do not have them, my lord,” Ulfur said, spreading his hands wide. He had a bit of an accent, too, something Scandinavian. Slowly I got to my feet, still clutching my purse and its spilled contents, watching the men warily, my gaze lingering for a minute on the larger of the two. He had short brown hair and a worried-looking face that was more interesting than handsome, and wore a pair of jeans and a dark brown leather jacket. From beneath the back of his jacket, I got a glimpse of something shiny, something bulky.

Clearly Ulfur was lying and up to no good. He’d no doubt taken something from the basement. I glanced down to my hands where the gold-chased stone was clutched with the coins, and amended that to he’d taken something valuable from the basement. It behooved me to tell the owner what Ulfur had done, but I couldn’t bring myself to speak. The English peer was just too . . . wrong. His presence felt bad, like he shouldn’t be there. Almost like he foreshadowed disaster.

“Where are they?”

The volume of his voice dropped, but I felt physical pain at Bael’s words, just as if they were etched with acid.

“I do not know, my lord,” Ulfur said again, his head bowed now. “I know only that my master sent me to find them before the lichmaster Ailwin did so.”

“Ailwin,” Bael snarled, and I heard the rain of glass, as if his very words had smashed the windows nearest us. “ That name I do know. Jecha!”

My eyeballs just about popped out of my head when, as if by magic, a large, muscular woman suddenly appeared before the peer. “My lord Bael?” she said, bowing low. “What is your pleasure?”

“Ailwin,” Bael said, the word flaying me like a whip. I backed up down the hall, toward what I knew was the kitchen. I didn’t know what was going on, but it brought up all sorts of unpleasant memories from a trip to visit my sister earlier this year, and I’d be damned if I got caught up in something weird again.

I bumped into something that moved, and almost shrieked, wheeling around to see Diamond making shooing gestures toward me. “I did both floors upstairs. Are you done here?”

“Am I . . . no!”

“No?” She frowned. “Oh, for pity’s sake . . . don’t tell me you saw a mouse!”

“No. I saw them.”

“Them who?”

“The people out front. The two men who came up from the basement.”

“What people? Cora, are you teasing me? I told you that this house was empty.”

“Yeah, well, tell that to the basement people.”

“Tch ,” she said, pulling open the basement door. “Let me go down and see for myself.”

“They’re up here now,” I called after her disappearing figure, but she evidently decided to ignore me.

I tiptoed down the hallway until I could see the front doors. Bael was grinding out some horrible instructions about locating and torturing the person named Ailwin, going into sickening detail about what he’d like done.

“Go,” Bael said, waving his hand toward the woman, and just like that, she was gone. “As for you . . .”

Ulfur had half turned toward me, angling himself so his back was to the wall, no doubt to keep anyone from seeing that he had an object stuffed into the back of his jacket.

I bit my lip, unsure if I should say something, or just let it go. I didn’t condone stealing at all, but . . . my little devil urged me to turn around and walk out of the house, to leave the two men alone, but my conscience wouldn’t let me. It was obvious the strange stone I held must belong to the Englishman, and that meant I had to return it.

I started toward him with the intention of doing just that when Bael threw wide his arms and, with a voice filled with fury, screamed, “Abi in malam crucem, confer te in exsilium, appropinquabit enim judicium Bael! ”

“Go to torment, go into banishment, for the judgment of Bael is at hand,” I whispered in translation, and just like that, I was slammed by a wall of power as the floor fell out from beneath my feet.

A scream was literally ripped from my throat as I plummeted into blackness, but it was a short-lived scream, one that turned to, “Ow! Ow, ow, ow! Jesus wept!” For the second time in a few minutes, I shook stars from my eyes and pushed myself into a sitting position, wincing when my hands, still clutching my things, came into contact with sharp, pointy rocks. “What the hell ?”

“Not Abaddon, no,” a weary voice came from behind me. I got to my knees and looked over a large, craggy boulder that squatted next to me. The man named Ulfur lay facedown on the rocky ground. “Worse. We’re in the Akasha.”

“How . . . what . . . huh?” I looked around as I got painfully to my feet. We seemed to be on some sort of horrible windswept, rocky moor. Or at least what I thought of as a moor, never having seen one in person. But this place . . . it brought a new level of angst to the word “desolate.” The wind seemed to carry with it the voices of a thousand tormented souls, the ground, stones, and sparse vegetation all the same shade of dusty brown. It was very rocky—not soft, smooth rocks, but sharp, pointed ones that jabbed up out of the earth as if they were straining to escape. “What’s an Akasha ? ”

Ulfur groaned as he rolled over, brushing himself off as he sat up. “The Akashic Plain, more frequently known as the Akasha, is what mortals think of as limbo. It’s a place of punishment, of permanent banishment, and before you ask, yes, it is possible to leave it, but you have to be summoned out. I think my face is broken.”

“Limbo? How did we get here? We were in the house.... Ow. What the devil . . .” I tossed my handful of coins, flinching as I pulled a thin sliver of gold from where it had pierced my finger. “Oh, holy Chihuahua, that hurts. Ugh. I broke the rock you stole.”

“The what?” Ulfur touched his forehead, his fingers pulling away red.

“The rock you dropped when you crashed into me. The one you stole from that English dude. All the little gold parts are twisted up, and the gray stone is in about a dozen little pieces.”

He jerked upright at that, one hand scrabbling behind him to find whatever it was he had stuffed beneath his coat. What he pulled out was a flattened goldfish disk, discolored and stained. “The Anima! Oh, no . . .”