In the Company of Vampires

Page 2

“And if that doesn’t say Loki at work a millennium ago, then I don’t know what does,” I growled a minute later, stuffing the necklace into my pocket as I pulled on my gloves again, hurrying down the road to a busy cross street. I hesitated at the bus stop, knowing time was of the essence. If the emotions I’d felt on the kidnapper’s necklace was right—and I had no reason to doubt my psychometric abilities—then he and his buddies were planning on hustling Geoff to the airport in a few hours. I had little time to make it to the warehouse they were using before she was out of my reach.
“This situation calls for a little splurging. After all, if you can’t spend a little mad money when your roomie is kidnapped, when can you?” I muttered to myself as I hunted down a cab. I finally found one and gave the driver instructions on where to go. “I don’t know the address, but I do know it’s on Knowles Street. Big warehouse with the picture of a penguin painted on the side.”
“Sounds like the old Icy Treats place,” she said, punching in a couple of buttons on her laptop before pulling out into traffic. “Shouldn’t take us long to get there.”
Fifteen minutes later we pulled up a half block away. I looked at the warehouse, worried that we were too late, but no, there was the nose of a black van just barely visible from behind an industrial-sized trash bin. I glanced back at the cab, gnawing on my lower lip for a second. “Um . . . how much would it cost for you to wait here for me?”
“How long will you be?” the driver asked me. She had bright yellow hair—not blond, actual yellow—and so many piercings on her head I couldn’t count them all.
“I don’t know. Maybe ten minutes?”
She named a figure. “But you’ll have to pay me what you owe me now. I’m not allowed to let customers leave without paying.”
I flinched at the amount she mentioned, but gave a mental shrug as I pulled out some cash, thrusting it toward her. “Wait for me. I’ll be as quick as I can.”
“Ten minutes. After that, I leave,” she said, getting out of her cab to lean a hip against it. “I need a smoke anyway.”
I nodded and hurried behind the trash bin, peering around it in the very best James Bond “sneaking up on kidnappers” manner. No one was in the van, and although the warehouse had windows, they were boarded up. I prayed they had no sort of high-tech security system as I dashed to a small door along the wall, pausing to snatch up a big piece of metal pipe that was lying near the trash bin. I weighed it for a couple of seconds, trying to decide if I could actually bring myself to use it, but the memory of the stark horror in Geoff’s eyes had me clutching it tight. “You are going to be one sorry god if she’s hurt,” I snarled under my breath.
The door creaked a little when I opened it a few inches, making me flinch and hold my breath, but no sound emerged from the warehouse, and nothing met my gaze as I peeked in. Sending a little prayer to the god and goddess my mother always swore would always protect me, I slid inside, braced for an outcry or attack.
The warehouse was mostly empty, a huge old building filled with a whole lot of black, and a few faint rustling noises that I took to be rodents. I wasn’t particularly afraid of rats and mice, finding the two-legged variety much more worrisome. But the relative quiet of the warehouse worried me. Was I too late? Had the men taken Geoff off in another car?
The faintest murmur of male voices had me stiffening as I turned to the right, where the vaguely black shape of a staircase loomed. I gripped my piece of pipe and started up the stairs, blindly feeling my way up each step, moving slowly and carefully so as not to alert anyone to my presence.
By the time I neared the top of the stairs, the sounds of voices were much clearer. I flattened myself against the steps and eased up my head to see how many of them there were. In a small oval pool of bluish white light, three men stood around another person, who had been tied to a chair.
Three against one. Not very good odds. But I wasn’t about to let Loki take my roomie. With another deep breath, I lifted my pipe and flung myself up the last couple of stairs, yelling a one-word spell of protection that my mother had insisted I learn. “Salvatio!”
The first man dropped before I even realized that I had swung my pipe at his head.
“Oh my god!” Geoff screamed as I stood stunned for a second, staring down at the man lying at my feet. “That was awesome!”
The two other men clearly couldn’t believe it, either, because they stared at their fallen buddy for a couple of seconds before turning identical expressions of surprise on me.
That didn’t last long. The one who had shoved me out of the van yelled something in a Nordic language and ran for me.
“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” I told him as I swung my pipe and sidestepped him, the pipe connecting with the back of his head with a metallic clang that made my stomach turn over. “I’m not at all a brave person. I don’t beat people up. Ever. Well, okay, maybe a demon or two, but they aren’t real people.”
“The master will have your life for this,” the third guy said as he slammed me up against a wall.
“Get him! Smash him! Beat his brains in!” Geoff chanted from her chair, the scrape of wood against the floor audible as she chair-hopped over to us.
“Eep,” I managed to squeak out, trying to crack the man on the head with my pipe, but he had wised up after watching his two buddies drop and held my arm straight out at my side. His fingers started to tighten around my neck, causing black splotches to dance in front of my face. “Tell your master that he can’t have Geoff. If he wants to get tough, he’ll have to face me, and the last time he did that, it didn’t end well for him.”
The man stopped strangling me for a second, a look of confusion filling his eyes. “Who are you?” he asked.
The chair screeched against the floor.
I twisted my body, bringing my knee up to nail the guy in the noogies, biting his arm at the same time. He cursed profanely, dropping to his knees as I raised my pipe high over my head. “My name is Francesca Ghetti, the keeper of the Vikingahärta, and Loki’s worst nightmare!”
“You go, Fran!” Geoff cheered as I stood over the kidnapper.
Her words brought some sanity back to me. I was panting, the blood rushing in my ears, my heart beating wildly. I looked down on the man for a second, toying with the thought of braining him, too, but instead I just stomped on his foot hard enough to make him yelp, and jumped over his halfhearted attempt to grab me.
“There’s an X-Acto knife over there,” Geoff said, nodding toward a rickety table half hidden by shadows. “I’ve been watching it for the last ten minutes, trying to figure out how I could get to it. Oh no, you don’t, Buster Brown.”
As I snatched up the knife, Geoff kicked at the kidnapper, who was just getting to his feet. He howled as she hit him dead center in his groin.
“Oh, that has to hurt,” I murmured as I bent over her, cutting through the nylon cord that bound her to the chair. “Poor guy isn’t going to have kids after this.”
“Poor guy? Are you insane? He’s a kidnapper! You sure you don’t want to smash his brains in?” Geoff asked when her bonds fell to the ground. She rubbed her wrists, glaring down at the writhing man. One of the others started to moan and move his arms and legs.
“I’m sure. Let’s get out of here before the other two wake up.”
“Okay, but you know, no one would blame you for roughing them up a little. . . .”
We made it outside before the groin man started down the stairs (hunched over quite a bit). I didn’t stop to explain to Geoff, just grabbed her arm and hauled her after me to where the cabby was just getting back in her car. “Take us to 1021 Woodline Avenue,” I told the cabby, shoving Geoff in the car. I glanced back at the warehouse, adding, “And hurry, please.”
The door to the warehouse was flung open, and two men staggered out. I was relieved to see that I hadn’t done any permanent damage to them, and hoped the third wasn’t seriously hurt. The cabby eyed them for a moment, then met my gaze in the rearview mirror. “You in some sort of trouble?”
“No. Someone else is going to be, though,” I said grimly.
“Gotcha.” She gunned the engine and pulled a very illegal U-turn, the shouts of the guys faintly following us as we zipped down the road.
I leaned back against the seat, letting go of my breath.
“You want to tell me what all that was about?” Geoff asked, examining her wrists.
“Er . . . not really.”
“They thought I was you, you know,” she said, eyeing me carefully.
“They what?”
She nodded. “They called me Francesca. I guess it’s because I copied your haircut before you cut yours. They said the master wanted to see you, and they were going to take me to him. What the hell is going on, Fran? Who were those goons? And why would they want to kidnap you to take you to some bondage dude? Or wait—was it a kidnapping?”
“Bondage dude?” I asked, confused how she leaped from Loki to that.
“Master, remember? What else is that if not bondage?” She eyed me again. “You know, I had no idea you were into that sort of thing. I’m not, myself, but I have friends who run a little club in town—”
I held up my hand to stop her. “I’m not into bondage. The master in this instance isn’t into bondage, either. At least I don’t think he is. He’s an old man. A really old man.” Like a couple of thousand years, at least. “He’s . . . uh . . .”
She raised an eyebrow as I thought frantically of what to tell her. Almost a year of living with her had made me very well aware that she freaked out at anything even remotely supernatural. There was no way she wouldn’t do the same if I told her the old Norse gods were alive and well and after revenge.
At least one of them was.
“He’s what?” she asked, prodding me.