"Sizemore, Susan - Laws of the Blood 2 - Partners" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sizemore Susan)
Char turned off the engine and wiped her eyes. She knew she would not let herself cry anymore. She would run in out of the rain, go into the place that no longer had Jimmy's magic attached to it, and she would unpack.
"There's no magic here," she said. "Just a job."
After a good day's sleep, she would start looking for Daniel. How hard could it be to sense the presence of a vampire in a town where no vampires were supposed to live?
She got out of the car and looked down the hillside and up at the building, letting the rain and fierce wind pour and pound over her. She glanced up at the storm-split sky. Lots of lightning tonight.
The cold and the wet and the lightning didn't bother her. The weather was a strong, powerful thing, but it was natural and right. The storm was a part of the city. The magic all around, though...
She'd been wrong about there not being any magic.
Char felt the dark surge of it beneath the power of the storm. Not Jimmy's kind of magic, oh no. Evil. Dark. Vicious and barely controlled. Someone somewhere was conjuring, preparing to channel -
Char stepped out into the center of the alley behind the building. There was a low fence on one side of the alley overlooking a hillside garden. She looked over the fence and down toward the center of the city. It was so very dark in the heart of town. She was cold, but not from the weather. Her nerves strung out tautly, her mind and heart ached, but not with her own old, well-known pain. A new sorrow filled Char, and a fear that was beyond bearing but not her own rose to a pitch that nearly made her scream.
She tried to tell herself that what she experienced was the residue of recent events in Seattle. That she was feeling the deaths of the strigoi Istvan had executed. But Char knew what she sensed had nothing to do with her own kind. Or so she hoped, prayed. She hugged herself close and couldn't help but mutter an old prayer learned in mortal childhood.
It didn't comfort her one little bit when the fear and agony rose up all around, exploded through her, and crashed down like all the water in Elliot Bay coming down like a tidal wave.
Char clutched at the fence to keep from falling, but her hands slipped, and she went to her knees. It was not the blinding flash of nearby lightning or the crack of thunder immediately overhead that sent the worst shock through her. It was the sound of the woman crying out, "Help me!" as she died that sent Char over the edge into darkness, falling face first into the icy stream of water running down the alley.
Chapter 5
"My mother always said I'd end up in the gutter," Char said when she came back to her senses and found herself lying on the ground in a freezing stream of water. Her mother had never actually said any such thing, but a quip seemed the appropriate way to distance herself from the situation.
She sat up, soaking wet and shivering, pushed hair out of her face, then wiped water out of her eyes. She pulled herself to her feet. Char had to hold onto the fence for a while to get under enough control so that she could make her way up the back stairs and into the building.
She was so shaken that she barely noticed her surroundings once she entered the third-floor condo. The place smelled of dust and felt unused, and the psychic emptiness was fine with her. What was important was that there were towels and soap in the linen closet and plenty of hot water gushed out of the showerhead when she turned it on. She stripped out of her wet clothes as quickly as she could and stepped into the shower. She was so glad to feel hot water running over her chilled body that she almost forgot feeling the woman's death for a few minutes. Almost.
She had killed mortals, of course, several times and without any qualms. She was no angel; she was a vampire. She had killed a vampire once as well and had taken pleasure in the act, though she'd been quite disturbed about it later. She had the slim consolation of knowing that each death she'd brought about had been deserved. The mortals had preyed on other mortals. She had served all of humanity by ridding the world of them. The vampire's death had been decreed necessary by the Council, and killing him had completed Char's transformation into a Nighthawk. The world needed Nighthawks - Enforcers - to keep the strigoi and mortal worlds safe and separate. Each of those deaths had been accompanied by magic. Vampires and Enforcers were made by magic. Spells had to be cast as well as blood exchanged. She preferred to think of the process that was called magic as an advanced method of energy manipulation, but however you defined it, magic was all about power. You had to get energy from somewhere in order to manipulate reality. A human mind gave off a lot of energy, especially when experiencing strong emotions. Terror, and the release of death, were very powerful sources of energy. Char knew this in theory and in practice, and she preferred theory.
The death she'd felt earlier tonight had not been theoretical, and it had been accompanied by ritual magic.
"Maybe." Char shuddered with the memory but held onto a shred of hope that she'd mistaken what she'd sensed. It was possible; she was out of practice and out of touch. The death had been real. The woman who had died had been psychic enough to shout for help. And asking for help at every level with every conscious and unconscious resource at your command was a logical way of reacting at the instant of death.
"The woman was murdered." Char shuddered again and shut off the tap at the exact instant that the hot water ran out. That wasn't any magical talent, she told herself as she grabbed a towel. She'd used this bathroom every day for several years, and old habits were hard to forget.
"Murdered," she said again and looked in the mirror.
She had a reflection, of course. Sometimes she thought it would fade, but that was on the days she was feeling particularly like a nonentity, particularly sorry for herself. It had nothing to do with her being a vampire. A great deal of the bad publicity that stigmatized her kind could be traced to other magic-using entities, but vampire was a catchy, sexy term that people remembered. You could hang just about any evil and ridiculous behavior pattern on vampires. True, there were some entities that couldn't cross running water, some that reacted badly to all forms of alum. There were all sorts of behaviors, all of them restrictions that came about due to the type of magic that had created the entity. Vampires took the rap for all of them. Fortunately, no one really believed in vampires - strigoi spent a great deal of time and money seeing to it - so it didn't really matter.
Magic mattered, though, and murder. The woman who had died could have been a vampire. Char had felt her strength as she died and knew what a waste the woman's murder was. It was a tragedy on several levels. For one, the poor woman would now never have any chance to explore all she could have been. For another there was a vampire out there who would never be able to take her as companion. The strigoi community was too tiny to sustain many losses like that. A predator population should remain small, but...
Char shook her head. She was letting herself sink into the comfortable security blanket of layers and layers of facts and data and analyses when she should act!
| © 2025 Библиотека RealLib.org (support [a t] reallib.org) |