The Demon Accords Compendium Volume 1 Read online

  I had heard the rumors; hell, I’d had some of the same thoughts myself. That her traumatic past had blocked her emotional development, stunted her feelings. I didn’t believe any of them any more. It was more like she was… waiting.

  One of the regular wait staff came in. “Oh, Lydia. Your table needs another round. Well, at least two of them do,” she said to me.

  Nika raised an eyebrow at me, smirking.

  Yeah, he’s interesting as hell, but I don’t know why—I thought at her. Her smirk quirked into a real smile and she nodded in agreement before turning to keep an eye on T and her current petitioner.

  Blue, blue eyes glanced at me then away, telling me that Tanya was, on some level, aware of my back and forth with Nika, and a bit curious.

  I circled back to the boys out of blue, bringing another Mule and another rum and Coke. Officer Eyes was only just starting his second Corona. He watched me as soon as I entered their space, eyes curious, alert, and nowhere near as intoxicated as his friends were getting.

  The pattern repeated itself several times, waitress duty, Tanya duty. I judged T as being just a short time from abandoning her faithful admirers and dragging Nika to the dance floor. Taking another swing by the coppers, I took a new approach. Coming up behind the intriguing one, using every bit of Darkkin skill and stealth, I leaned down by that sweet-smelling neck.

  “Falling behind your friends a bit there, ay North boy?” I said in his ear. He didn’t jump but I finally got the heartbeat flutter I’d been missing. He paused a second, taking in the tiniest gulp of air, then turned his head to meet my gaze.

  “How do you know I’m from the North and not Canada?” he asked, puzzled. I’m next to his throat and that’s what he focuses on?

  I didn’t let on how gratifying it was that my ear for dialects hadn’t let me down. “Your accent. Kinda like a Canadian, but still not exactly like it. Ay, ya hoser,” I said. “So you look like you could use a shot to catch up with your pals.”

  His response was instant. “No, one of us needs to keep his wits about him in this wicked nest of vampires,” he said with a smile. It came across as joking but he meant it.

  “Oh, you’ll be safe enough, Officer. We don’t eat our civil servants,” I said.

  Mission accomplished, I spun around and headed back. On impulse, I glanced back, catching him watching my exit. A drunk guest took a swipe at my behind, but humans will never catch a vampire who doesn’t want to be caught. That second Corona was almost gone and I decided to grab him another. For some reason, I wanted to see his guard go down. Below, I heard soft Darkkin voices warning that Tanya and Nika were headed out for the next song. Instead of joining them, I decided to see what Officer Eyes thought of my girl. Fresh beer on tray, I circled the floor, coming back to my table. Officer Eyes was gone. I did a quick scan. No, he was by the railing, looking down. The house lights dimmed as they always do when our dancing is about to begin. Because it’s such a regular occurrence, many of the club guests knew what that meant.

  “Tatiana, Tatiana, Tatiana, Tatiana,” began to echo through all three levels of the club. It was now too dark for humans to see much, but I could see Officer Chris like it was merely dim. He seemed to be systematically searching the crowd below. The excitement in the place was palpable, the chanters shortening their call to just “Tat.”

  Below, on the dance floor, the band began a new song, one of Tanya’s favorites. People at the railings began to shove a bit, jockeying for a better vantage point. My subject had stopped his search and turned his oh-so-interesting gaze on the dance floor. The song exploded and the spotlights blasted the center of the floor. I didn’t have to look to know that Tanya and Nika would be killing it. Hell, normally I’d be right there with them. It was too loud to hear heartbeats, but I could see the pulse jump on my officer’s neck as he took in the sight below him, finally reacting to something in a normal way. Suddenly, he stepped back, shocked for a second, and I just knew he’d seen my girl. She has that effect on almost everyone, mesmerizing the masses without effort. But his stunned look changed to something else, something that greatly disturbed me—recognition. Now my guard came up. How could he recognize her?

  And then he did the unthinkable: He looked away from her and went back to his scan of the bar area below. There was something almost frantic about it and it held back my first impulse, which had been to grab him and drag him away for questioning. He had recognized Tanya, but he was looking for someone else, and he was most anxious to find them. His head scanned the crowd then suddenly snapped back, his eyes narrowing, expression changing from worried to another look that I knew intimately—predatory.

  Now he was moving, heading for the stairway down. He jigged and jived his way through the crowd. I shifted to keep him in sight, and his head snapped my way. Bright violet eyes locked onto me for a split second, then he dismissed me, his head whipping around to look back. He tensed up for a moment, then relaxed minutely as he spotted whoever had dragged his attention away from Tanya. He leaned against a post, indexing his body toward the dance floor, but his face was angled toward the bar. I moved, sliding over to look down where he was looking. Nothing and no one stood out, at least to me, but he was locked like a hound on a scent.

  The song ended and the regular house lights came up. Officer Chris headed down the stairs, moving through the crowd, his body language telling me he was on the hunt. For who?

  “They’re leaving the floor,” the club manager said in a low voice, the Darkkin equivalent of a PA announcement. I still couldn’t see who the cop was following, no matter how hard I tried. There was a sense of someone moving through the crowd, but I couldn’t quite get a view of him. Chris the cop seemed to have no trouble and now his path took him behind a couple of the Darkkin bodyguards assigned to keep anyone from getting into the employee-only section.

  I watched him walk right behind one of the guards, just slipped right through two experienced vampires.

  “Hey, there you are. What do you think?” Nika said suddenly. I turned around and found her standing by my side—alone.

  “Where’s T?” I asked, looking behind and around her.

  “She went through the door,” she said, pointing. “She wanted…” Her voice trailed off and her eyes narrowed as she picked up something on her Nika radar. “Attack! Tanya’s been attacked!” she said, voice loud by vampire standards.

  I moved, breezing past the two guards. “This way,” I said. I felt Nika and the guards behind me as I followed Tanya’s scent trail, along with the scent of the cop and something else—something that stunk of sulfur.

  Vadim was suddenly by my side and when I hit the next door hard enough to tear it from its hinges, I followed it and let him by me to deal with anything or anyone hostile. My only thought was Tanya.

  There she was—standing in a pool of blood, hers by the scent, her white dress now scarlet and torn. Yet she stood tall and strong, unbroken skin, healthy and whole, showing through the sections of torn and ruined cloth. She was holding up the cop, who leaned like a drunk against stacked supplies. A silver blade and two silver spikes lay on the floor in front of them.

  Vadim cocked his arm, ready to kill the first human ever in Plasma and instead locked up tight at the brain-freezing sound of “Nyet!” that came from… Tanya.

  I felt her command seize up my body even as my brain processed the fact that she had just spoken a word, had yelled out a command. The whole group who had responded turned to look at our natural-born princess. Then Nika and I were moving, shoving through the others to get to our Tanya.

  Details speared my mind. She was holding him. He was reeling from blood loss. Her blood was spread everywhere but she was fine—perfect. A smear on the corner of her lips. She had drunk his blood—a lot of his blood. And now she protected him. And had spoken for the first time in fifteen years.

  Behind me, I sensed Galina arriving. “What is all this?” she asked in Russian.

  “Mother, I was attacked. This man help
ed me. The attacker ran down the hall and out the back exit,” Tanya said, also in Russian, not smoothly but clearly understandable.

  Guards turned and moved after the attacker. Nika was right up on Chris the cop, studying him. “The attacker was thin and reedy lo-” Tanya started, still speaking Russian, but Nika interrupted her.

  “He’s lost a lot of blood. He needs fluids, like now!” our blonde mind reader said in English.

  Tanya turned to me. “Lydia?” she asked. From her, it was a cry for help. Not again, never again. Not another death laid upon her fangs on my watch!

  “I’m on it,” I said, moving like I’d never moved before. We were in the storage section, so I only had to travel back through the torn doorway and grab the first fluids stacked on the pallets in the hallway. Behind me, I heard Galina ask the cop his name.

  “Chris… Chris Gordon,” I heard in that lightly accented voice.

  “He’s a cop,” I said, popping back into the room, handing him the drink. He took it, looked at it, eyebrows raising in astonishment, then, despite reeling from blood loss, surrounded by hyped-up vampires, he laughed. He was staring at the drink, red Gatorade, and it took a second for the irony to hit me. I found myself preoccupied by the look on Tanya’s face as she watched his every move. It was a… possessive look. Oh my.

  “He’s here with some cop friends. I watched him follow some guy who was following Tanya,” I said.

  Despite being wobbly, he got the cap off the bottle and took a healthy swig. Funny, but his heart sounded pretty good. Tanya must have either not taken as much blood as she’d lost or… No… that couldn’t be… Could it?

  Nika was also studying Officer Chris, and I was dying to know what she heard. Her eyes widened. “He is a hunter of something… demons, I think. At least he thinks he is. He thinks maybe we will kill him now and he will fight us, but is almost relieved. Almost as if he would welcome it,” she said, all in Russian.

  Chris frowned, clearly not understanding but somehow thoroughly annoyed with us.

  “Well, you people don’t need me for your private conversations, so I’ll just be going,” he said.

  He stood, weak like a kitten but ready to go. One of the guards, Arkady, stepped forward aggressively, face transforming into full-on vampire. “You go nowhere, human blood bag,” he snarled. No, no you idiot! I thought. Arkady was old, didn’t he see the signs? Nika glanced at me, eyes wide.

  A mix of emotions flashed across the young police officer’s face. Fear, followed by anguish, followed quickly by rage. Nika gasped. I ignored her, too concerned with the next few seconds. Chris leaned down and grabbed one of the bloody spikes on the floor. He wiped it on his sleeve and then took a knife fighter’s stance. Shit, shit, shit! The situation was devolving quickly.

  “Fuck off, Fang! Why don’t you come over here? I’ll show you where I keep the good silver,” the young idiot said to the pissed-off warrior vampire.

  Before anyone else could screw up, before I could even form a thought, Tanya moved. So fast even my vampiric vision couldn’t follow her actions. She just simply was there—standing between Arkady and the cop, her back to the deadly silver spike, every bit of her focused on the threatening vampire. And she was growling. A deep, deadly growl that somehow conveyed instant death to the much larger vampire. It was a crystal clear message that if he twitched, she would end him.

  For his part, Arkady was smart enough to realize that he stood no chance if she wanted him true dead. In fact, no one in the building other than Vadim stood a chance against her, and even then I’d put my money on Tanya. Vadim was her instructor and sparring partner, but I don’t think my girl had been going all out in their almost daily contests. I don’t think she’d been that motivated. But that had changed. In the last five minutes, a great deal had changed.

  “Enough!” Galina said into the tension. “Arkady, get the clean-up gear and get rid of this blood. Tanya, calm down. No one will hurt him.” Her voice stayed even but her orders to Arkady were as firm as her assurances to Tanya were real. One of her gifts. She recognized that something major had just happened with her daughter, but I wondered if she realized just what. Observant but not always sensitive, our Galina.

  Arkady moved backward and down the hall, wisely clearing himself from the immediate danger zone.

  Tanya relaxed and turned to check over her cop. And he was her cop. I could see that possessiveness in every inch of her being. Whoa, whoa, whoa!

  Nika’s eyes kept flaring and I was dying to know what the kid was thinking that kept surprising her so.

  “My apologies, Officer Gordon. Arkady is a trifle overzealous. But where are my manners? I am Galina Demidova; you have met my daughter Tatiana. This is Nika. You have already met Lydia. This is Vadim, our head of security,” Galina said, pointing us all out.

  Recognition of the name Demidova flashed across his face. Then he turned and looked at Tanya, then back at Galina, visibly comparing the two. They looked enough alike to make him realize the truth of her words. The truth that had set the Darkkin world on fire twenty-three years ago. The truth that almost started a civil war. Nika smirked at the kid and he turned his puzzled gaze on her. Realization flooded his features.

  “Some can,” Nika said to something he was thinking. I could easily guess the trail of his thought. Damn, this kid was fast. Low blood drunk and surrounded by vampires and he was arriving at answers faster than any normal human should.

  “So is your daughter Tatiana or Tanya? I’m confused… more confused?” he asked. Of all the things to ask, he chose to ask about the girl. Either super smart or super lucky.

  “Tatiana is her formal name, Tanya is her short name. Like Jennifer and Jen,” Galina answered.

  “Officer Gordon, would you be so kind as to tell us what happened here?”

  He looked back at her for a second, then glanced over all the vampires, looked at Nika, met my gaze, and finally looked directly at Tanya. Then he nodded, as if it was a big decision.

  And launched into a story. A story of visions, demons, Hell, and our princess. He reached out and grabbed an inventory clipboard, flipping the paper over, his bloody fingers smearing the white with red. A short, stubby pencil appeared from his back pocket and he started to draw. The truly odd part was that he never once looked at what he was drawing, instead continuing to talk about demons from Hell in our club. He was done so fast, I thought he must have just scribbled, but then he handed the picture to Tanya and slumped back on his crate. I looked over her shoulder, feeling Nika and Galina moving up beside me to look as well. It was sharp, detailed, and sophisticated, showing a clear depiction of a man with a knife, body angled to attack a spiked and wounded Tanya.

  “That’s your guy… er… demon. Demon ridden, if you want to get technical. I call them Hellbourne. The body is just a shell,” he said.

  “How do you know all this? How can you know all this?” I asked, mouth running away from brain.

  Galina gave me a glare. I don’t really answer to her although I have to keep on her good side if I want my job to run smoothly. North boy thought about my question, brow furrowing.

  “The clergy say that I’m God Touched. Personally, I think He bitch slapped me. We have agreed to disagree on that point,” he said.

  “Clergy?” Galina asked.

  “Yeah, well, the various churches come to me for their tougher exorcisms. The prayers and holy water routine doesn’t always work,” he said with a casual shrug.

  “And you do?” Galina pressed.

  “I don’t use their techniques. I’m more of a hands-on kinda guy,” he said, shrugging again. “The entities that make up most possessions are pretty easy to yank out and send back to Hell. Plus I’m nondenominational.”

  I knew from the moment I saw him that the kid was different, but this? This was too much. He looked around at us, swigging his drink. Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he continued. “You all seem to be having a lot more trouble believing me than I’m having believing
all this,” he said, waving one hand at us and especially at Tanya. Girl was focused on him like a spotlight.