Stone Chameleon (Ironhill Jinn #1) Page 2

  Elven daggers in hand, I rushed toward the sloshing sound, which had replaced the screaming and was growing in volume. A mewling cry came before gurgling took its place. Coughing to clear the lump from my throat, I stopped and looked back to make sure nobody had followed me. I was alone as far as I could see.

  Images of razor-spined bog toads and mutated alligators crossed my mind, not that I’d seen one since we relocated most of the reptiles down to the dangerous creature reserve in the Florida Everglades. Although I rarely risked exposing my talents with my crew around, the prickly fear dragging against my spine demanded I brace myself for a strike.

  I whispered greetings to the earth in a language I’d known instinctively since birth. The stone in the walls answered, a shimmer of power racing across the surface like the waver of heat rising from a sunbaked sidewalk. Almost imperceptible white sparks flitted within the distortion.

  A flex of my fingers could have caved in the entire structure or formed it into any shape, even a prison. Better that than to let a beast rip me to pieces or escape to wreak havoc among the mundanes. The non-humans of the world didn’t need any more bad press.

  I backed up against the wall and pressed my fingers along the slimy stone. Its flavor and unique vibrations to sang to me, caused a stirring in my soul and a tingle in my cells as I learned from it. With a shudder, my body took on the properties of that which I touched. My flesh hardened and darkened to slate gray, becoming as solid and difficult to harm as the rock itself. Not completely indestructible, but nearly so. As long as I kept my proportions the same, I didn’t have to worry about shredding my clothes. Being naked in the sewer was not a pleasant thought.

  Although the black shirt and jeans interrupted my camouflage, in the dim tunnel it would give me a few moments to observe the scene unhindered without worrying about anything biting my leg off.

  All sound had ceased by the time I came across someone floating face-down in the brown water ahead. The poor lighting didn’t illuminate it enough for me to identify the species, but something glinted in the air above it.

  I crouched and navigated around half-desiccated rat corpses and plenty of other unmentionables that littered the walkway in this section. After a thorough look and listen, finding nothing to set off alarms, I crept along the catwalk toward the still form.

  Within ten feet of it, the creature came into sharper focus. The leather-like skin and emaciated body identified a vampire. Good lord, not another one. The brown water obscured most of its stringy hair and face. Every bump of its spine jutted into view through translucent skin, along with the lines of each rib. As Harper had described, a small swarm of butterflies hummed around the corpse and appeared to be made of…water. What on earth?

  I took another step closer. The butterflies burst into a fine mist, drifting down like fog before dissipating.

  “Mercy mother of hellfire.” I hung my head to let the adrenaline burn off. Certain the assailant had fled, I imagined my body as flesh and bone once more. A few seconds of burning tingles, and my skin softened to pink again.

  Calling out to the stone once more, I coaxed a wide column to rise beneath the vampire so I could have a better look without getting wet.

  I stepped onto the makeshift platform and nudged the nude body with my foot. When it didn’t move, I stashed my daggers back in their sleeves, then bent and rolled it over. The texture of its skin reminded me of an old vinyl binder cover—the telltale sign of a fresh inductee to the hive—inducing a desire to find a gallon of hand sanitizer.

  Even wet, the young male weighed no more than a sack of sawdust. Like the last four I’d found, his yellowish ribs jutted wide as if someone had opened him like a garden gate. His mouth lay stretched in a silent scream, his black eyes vacant, and his heart was missing, just like the others. That settled it—we had a vampire serial killer in our midst.

  Isaac, the lord of the local hive, would be furious. The more lesser vampires in a hive, the greater the draw of power for the lord. It was the worst sort of pyramid scheme of all time. A newborn vampire came in at the bottom of the pile, and the others received varying degrees of his or her life energy. Only when enough above the new one perished during a power struggle would they be set free to keep their energy for their own, to live in the mainstream or to set up their own hive. Isaac wasn’t the deadliest of the world’s vampire lords, so I’d heard, but he came close.

  I hadn’t a clue what could overtake the strength and speed of a vampire and get him to lay still while they peeled him open. And what could have cut such neat incisions into his chest during the time it took me to get there? He would have been alive until the perpetrator removed the heart. Although it didn’t beat, whatever magic animated the undead resided there.

  Had the killer eaten it? Taken it as a trophy of sorts? I considered feeling around the bottom for it, but decided the police might be upset with me for disturbing their crime scene more than I needed to.

  Why did circumstance always send me into these situations alone? It was as if it was by design, but that was silly. Why would anyone want to indicate me in the death of vampires? I not only fought to protect them physically on the streets, but had also spent a decade trying to change the laws that kept them from integrating into human society.

  Isaac had eyed me with suspicion when I’d found the last one. It would be nearly impossible to convince him of my innocence this time.

  “Lou,” Dom’s frantic voice came over the comm, “Harper’s in the van, but I think you’d better get up here before they all come down there.”

  Good lord, what now? “Who?”

  “Reporters and camera crews from every damn news station in the state, and they don’t seem to care about what’s down there as long as they get a statement from you about whether this thing we’re hunting is connected to the vampire murders.”

  Bloody hell. “Call Detective Peterson discreetly, because there’s been another one. Don’t tell those nosy vultures anything. I’ll be right there.”

  If the media knew where to find me, it meant one thing—my boss had some explaining to do.

  Chapter Two

  The July sun had fallen below the buildings by the time I’d made it back to the ladder and emerged from the maintenance hole. Camera flashes spotted my vision from a large crowd near the IPC cube van, and dozens of voices crashed together at once as reporters thrust microphones toward me.

  “Miss Hudson, do you know how many murders there’ve been?”

  “Is the creature in the sewer now? Have you killed it? Was it afraid of you?”

  “What kind of monster is it? Is it the same one slaughtering vampires in Ironhill?”

  “Is it true you’re a suspect in the hive murders, Miss Hudson?”

  They went on and on without pause as I pushed through them to get to the van. “No comment. What you’re asking is a hive matter, and I’m sure Lord Isaac will inform you as he sees fit.” Which would be exactly never. If I said a word about it, my situation would only grow worse. “Now, I need all of you to clear the area for your own safety.”

  It took concentration to keep my power from rising to protect myself as the mob cinched tighter. Dom came out of the back of the van and muscled his way through them. Half deaf from their shouting and blind from their cameras, I held onto Dom as we elbowed our way through the shifting bodies.

  Finally, we made it to the doors of the van, and Dom threw them open. I hopped into the back beside Harper, who lay groaning on the rubberized floor in a pool of dirty water.

  Dom locked us inside. “I remember you promising me this job would never be boring.” He gripped his narrow hips, panting. “Guess this is what you meant?”

  “I’m a woman of my word, Dominic. Well done getting Harper here through the chaos out there. Did you manage to get Gerry on the phone?”

  His frown caused my stomach to clench. “Oh yeah, I talked to him all right. He said, and I quote, ‘Tell Lou she’d better not move a muscle from that crime scene, or I�
��ll arrest her ass.’ He’s joking, right?”

  “Don’t worry about Gerry.” Landing in a human prison was the least of my worries at the moment.

  Dom sat on the stool built into the wracking near the monitors. “I also called City Hall and told them to get some people down here stat to seal off the entrances to tunnel six until the cops get here.”

  “That was good thinking.” Knowing Harper would need a hit of sugar and to buy myself time to think, I picked a pink Pixy Stix out of her stash, a sleeve containing pure colored sugar, and ripped it open.

  I didn’t dare call it the correct name in her vicinity, though. Before Abraham Lincoln was in diapers, the elves and their smaller cousins, the pixies, had suffered a falling out. Over, of all things, the lyrics to one of their sacred hymns. Mentioning them to Harper would earn me a glare and a week-long cold shoulder treatment. I’d have thought they’d have mended the relationship after so many centuries, but they were stubborn races. Nobody held a grudge like an elf.

  “Oh, I so love you right now,” Harper sang, opening her pink lips as I tilted her head up and fed the powder into her mouth. Elves, very much like humming birds, needed vast quantities of sugar to counteract their insane metabolisms.

  Without another distraction, I turned my attention to the murders. The more I considered the crime scenes and my apparent connection to them—the only connection I knew of—the darker my thoughts became. “Listen, Dom,” I said, “I must ask one more thing of you today.”

  Fear had come to roost in his light blue eyes, and something else that hadn’t been there before—respect and perhaps affection. “Anything, just ask.”

  “I need you to remain here to greet the police while I take Harper to Dr. Courian.”

  He pointed at the front, where his cell sat on the dash. “But you heard what Gerry said. Why can’t I take Harper and you stay here?”

  I sighed, steeling myself for Harper’s reaction. “Because I’ve yet again stumbled across a dead vampire while alone. If Lord Isaac takes me to the hive tonight to be tried under vampire law, then I’d like some time to make a few preparations. Not to mention I want time to think about how to approach my defense.” And to have a shower, but I left that unsaid.

  “What?” Harper tried to sit, moaned, and then lay back down. “We were totally with you all day.”

  “Yeah, what she said.” Dom gripped the racking that held all of our implements, his voice rising with urgency. “You have two witnesses who say you didn’t do it.”

  I backed toward the driver’s seat, eager to get away before the cruisers arrived. “Two witnesses who work for me, who technically weren’t with me for the last ten minutes. We have to trust that justice will prevail here, and I’m asking you to trust me now. Have Gerry drag the sewer for the murder weapon, which has to be a blade of some sort, and tell him I’ll meet him at the station at nine o’clock this evening. And if anything comes out of any maintenance hole along this street, you run like hell, Dominic. Don’t make me a liar to your grandmother.”

  Harper’s glare softened, and she cursed under her breath. “Take my spare piece, nerd boy. It’s by the netting on the top rack.”

  Moments passed, none of us moving or speaking, only three minds coming to the same conclusions. Finally, Dom’s shoulders straightened, and he opened his mouth, shut it again. “I don’t like guns, thanks anyway. See you later.” And then he was gone through the door, shutting it from the outside.

  “Isaac’s going to blow his stack again, isn’t he?” Harper said as I slipped behind the wheel and started the van.

  “To put it mildly, yes, but he can be reasonable.”

  Laughter bubbled out of her, but the sound cut off short. “I’m sorry, are we still talking about Isaac? I’ve seen him smash a table over your head.”

  “Technically, that was my fault.” I’d stepped between him and a human rights fanatic who’d burned down half of the vampire district, along with a few of its residents. “In the end, I saved the fanatic from a head injury and Isaac from facing a trial, and it only cost me a few stitches and a headache. He felt terrible about it.” As far as I could tell.

  I inched the van forward as Dom cleared us a path through the press to the street.

  “You have a dangerous habit of seeing good where there’s none. And it was forty-five stitches, and he damn near cracked your skull.” She mumbled something in elfish that sounded distinctly like a curse. “What promise did you make to Dom’s grandma?”

  “He’s all she has in the world, and she wants him to become a good man like his departed father was. He can only do that if he comes home at the end of each day.”

  “You promised you wouldn’t get him killed, then?”

  “Something like that. Mrs. Kennedy seems to think I’ll be good for him.” I questioned her judgement, considering I’d just left him with a herd of shouting reporters to await a grumpy police detective.

  “Wise lady. We’ll clear you, Lou. Isaac won’t be taking you without a firefight.”

  “If Isaac takes me, you’ll do nothing, or we’ll both end up prisoners of the hive, or worse.”

  “Yeah, not gonna happen.”

  Once Dom waved me forward through a break in the crowd, I maneuvered the van around the reporters still flashing cameras at me through the windshield while clenching my teeth. It was either that or argue with my best friend some more, but I’d have more luck talking a tree out of growing leaves.

  Contemplating how to approach Isaac about his latest loss, I pulled out of the alley onto Center Avenue. The main thoroughfare would lead me into the city core if I continued over the bridge. Instead, I turned left before crossing the Kimble River and headed out of town to IPC headquarters.

  Ironhill stood on the ground that had once been Philadelphia before a preternatural war destroyed it thirty-four years before. The only building that survived the razing was City Hall, with its white churchlike steeple rising above everything else. It stood in the geographical center of Philadelphia, and did so in Ironhill, too, the new city having been carefully planned around it.

  The landscape had been so completely demolished around the structure it stood atop a hill, hence the new name, I supposed. Most of downtown had been built low to the ground to allow the structure to be the focal point of the skyline, a monument to the death of a city. Most of the taller buildings were pushed to the outskirts. Ironhill was a green city, inhabited by enough trees and natural beauty it appeared the concrete and nature had compromised, both taking their half and nothing more.

  A buzzing against my hip sent a jolt through me. I fished my phone out my pants pocket and glanced at the screen: City Hall. Think of the devil, and he’ll ring in your pocket. Good lord, what now? Mayor Tate must have seen me on one of the live news casts, or Dom’s call had made it through City Hall’s chain of peons all the way to the big man’s office. Splendid.

  I cleared my throat and pressed my thumb against the answer button. “Lou Hudson.”

  “Miss Hudson,” a melodious voice said. “You are a hard woman to get in touch with.”

  If only he could see my sneer through the phone, I’d have been much happier. “What do you want, Mr. Bassili? How did you get my cell number, and why are you in the mayor’s office?”

  He’d been trying to date me for years, taking to outright stalking when I refused to see him. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d broken in to City Hall to use their phone just so I’d answer.

  “Call me Amun, please.” His seductive tone, tinged with a hint of his Persian roots, tightened my belly as it always did. “Have dinner with me.”

  My disgruntled sigh blew across the phone. “Amun,” I cursed his name at him, “as I’ve told you several times, I’d rather have dinner with a gargantuan troll slug, and I’m rather busy at the moment. Don’t you have another gala to host or a harlot to spend your millions on?”

  His laughter filled my chest with unwanted tingling. “Why do you resist me so hard? I just want to
talk to you in person. I’m not planning to ravage you upon sight.”

  Hearing him say “ravage” sent a warm shiver through my abdomen, inducing images I wanted to gouge out of my head. I’d seen him in the flesh once at a police benefit—though he appeared on TV daily when I watched—and I wanted to keep it that way.

  No man had ever scared me down to the bone the way he did, other than Lord Isaac, perhaps. Not that Amun had done anything in particular to frighten me, other than smile and cause warm sensations I didn’t want to feel for the self-absorbed media darling, usually in parts of my body he wasn’t welcome to touch.

  Low-rise buildings and pavement gave way to wheat fields and forest as I put my foot down on the accelerator, easing back when Harper groaned. “Tell me why you’re so adamant we meet? If it’s business, make an appointment at my office with Gloria.” I chided myself in silence for the breathy whisper my voice had become.

  “I think you know very well it’s not business. Is it so terrible that I want to know you? And for the record, I talked to your receptionist, and I have to say, this connection is stunningly clear for someone who’s gone to the moon to collect pixies.”

  I pulled the phone away from my mouth for a moment so my laughter wouldn’t reach him. Every few days I’d given Gloria a new ridiculous excuse why I couldn’t see or speak to him. I didn’t know how his giant ego survived my constant rejection. Perhaps that’s what drove him so hard to change my mind.

  Upon reaching the winding, tree-lined drive that would lead me to the sprawling IPC facility, I turned in and waited for Simon to open the iron gates. “Someone like you doesn’t want to know a lowly pest exterminator like me, Mr. Bassili. When you tell me what it is you want from me, I’ll consider seeing you. Now, unless you have a pest you need me to remove,” other than you, “please don’t contact me again.”

  I ended the call and tossed the cell onto the passenger seat. To prevent my hands from shaking, I clamped one onto the steering wheel and fished my polished black ebony stone from my pocket with the other. It was one of a kind. I’d found it while BASE jumping at the Cave of Swallows in Mexico, and local geologists had been intrigued when I showed it to them. They’d even let me name it. With grain-like striations in the rock, it reminded me of ebony wood, so it had been a no-brainer.