"Sizemore, Susan - Laws of the Blood 2 - Partners" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sizemore Susan)

But until then...

"I brought the strongest one I could find for the last sacrifice," he told them with his usual humility. "I did the best I could."

"Leave him alone. He did what we told him to do," the Prophet told the Demon. "Maybe that is the problem, she was too strong," the Prophet added. He ran thick fingers through his beard. It was his way of showing he was thinking deep thoughts. "Perhaps too strong for the link between the Vessel, the Angel, and myself."

The demon released him. The Disciple was dizzy and aching. He scurried backward, away from the Angel and toward the sanctuary door. "Shall I find another for the Vessel to kill?"

"Yes!" the Demon shouted. He waved his scaly arms excitedly. "Go. Now."

The Disciple looked to the Prophet, who continued thinking his deep thoughts but nodded eventually. "Yes," he said. "Take the Vessel with you, and find us a less toxic sacrifice this time."

There was a hole in the city. Char could see the blank spot in her memory of the landscape when she woke. Then she opened her eyes, and the details faded too quickly as her mind adjusted to being back in the solid world. The point of attempting to dream walk last day had been to find the man who'd shot her. No luck there. No mental trail or trace came to her, either from the man with the shotgun or the dissipated spirit of the murder victim. She found something when she turned her attention to the city, but now she wasn't sure what it was. All she had was the memory of being thrilled and frightened at some discovery.

The memory of having found something dire didn't do her much good. Dire was supposed to be SOP for a vampire cop. Or so Marguerite had assured her when she'd taken Char through the change. This was Char's first exposure to dire, and it left her more confused than energized for the hunt.

She got out of bed, frustrated and grumpy, and went to take a shower. She saw no evidence left of last night's attack when she checked her naked skin under the hot flow of water. The shower helped wake her up, but fully waking up also made the almost-memories more distant and dreamlike.

She got dressed slowly in wrinkled clothes out of her suitcase and thought about what to do with the night. She needed to find Daniel. She wanted to find her attacker. She wondered about the dead woman and whether the murder, the attacker, and the young vampire were connected. Probably. There didn't tend to be a lot of coincidences when you dealt with magic.

"Magic." There was that word again. "Psychic," she said. "I meant to say psychic." They were not the same thing, which she knew very well. Then why had she said one when she meant the other? "Because I had a bad day's sleep and I'm spitting out shotgun shot like they're hairballs and I'm staying in my old lover's place in a bed that's way too big and empty and if I don't stop talking to myself somebody is going to get the bright idea to put me away and get themselves killed for their trouble!"

Char stopped talking long enough to breathe, then put her hand over her mouth to keep from continuing to rave out her vehemence at the world in general and last twenty-four hours in particular. "Forty-eight," she corrected. She looked at herself in the dresser mirror and admitted, "Actually, it's been a bad week. Maybe I should have gone to Tucson instead of coming home for the holidays."

Holidays? That's right, it was Thanksgiving night, wasn't it? She'd formed some vague notion about going out for a meal while she was in the shower, but she doubted there would be many places open this time of night. At least anywhere she'd want to eat. She could have been spending a pleasant evening with Marguerite's nest, but here she was, alone as usual, and she'd probably be eating at a Denny's.

And why was she feeling sorry for herself while a woman who hadn't deserved to die was rotting up on a mountainside, with her family and friends worried sick and not having a cheerful holiday at all? And Helene Bourbon's vampire family was missing a young member and feeling the absence. Char had nothing to feel sorry about and was ashamed of herself as soon as she realized it.

She was an Enforcer. Her job was to enforce! Serve. Protect.

But she wasn't supposed to get shot at by mortals. She wasn't supposed to get shot at all. And she certainly shouldn't have let the man who'd shot her live after he'd seen her transformed into a Nighthawk. She'd seen herself in a mirror the night of her Nighthawk birth - that was part of the ritual - and it was not a pretty sight. She'd been informed there was a fierce beauty in the fanged muzzle and hideous claws that marked her as a killer of vampires, but she didn't agree. There was elegance and sensuality in the physical changes a vampire made to share blood with a mortal lover. There was a dangerous, predatory glamour about a hunting vampire. But Nighthawks were downright ugly. Fearsome, monstrous, they didn't bear any resemblance to vampires.

Jimmy Bluecorn had once told her that he didn't think Enforcers were vampires anymore at all but monsters that fed on monsters. The hypocritical part was that Jimmy, who was so honest about most things, never told her he was a carrier of the Nighthawk mutation. Char knew that she was not the only one of his children that had been reborn into a thing that her beloved Jimmy feared. Nor was blaming him for what she was fair to Jimmy. Not all his children were freaks.

There she was, feeling sorry for herself again. "What's the matter with me tonight?" Maybe it was the daymare still bugging her. She loved this city, and in the dream she'd searched and searched and found emptiness, streets that faded away, holes where she remembered buildings. She assumed that the violent way the area had been cleared of strigoi might account for the psychic emptiness.

"They deserved it," she added. One could encounter the aftermath and be sad, but the reasons had been sound.

Now she needed to be out on the street instead of staying home and thinking about the past. She knew full well that the older a vampire got, the harder it was to live in the present. But she hadn't been a vampire that long, and an Enforcer for hardly any time at all.

Char went out on the balcony, coughed, spat, and heard another piece of steel shot splash into a puddle below. She shook her head. "If I ever find the man who - " She closed her fist around the balcony railing and let her claws come out.

What she needed to do was find Daniel and get out of this haunted town. With no solid clues to rely on and no better way to spend Thanksgiving, she decided to follow the path taken by her dream self during the day and have a look around the heart of the city. The place would be dead on a holiday evening, she reasoned. Dead of night in a dead town: what better time for a vampire to have a look around.

"Irony, someone told me," she murmured as she went inside for her purse and car keys. "It's your strongest weapon. Use it wisely."



He was not quite drunk. Haven never got drunk, though he sometimes let himself get close. This was one of those times. There was a bottle beside him on the seat of the Jeep, his shotgun under the seat, an arsenal in a locked case in the back and a voice in his head riding him mercilessly as he drove the streets, looking for the creature he was going to kill.