Karen Chance - Touch the Dark

Table of Contents

I fought him, knowing from childhood that looking a vampire directly in the eyes made it easier for him to control you, but everyone ignored us, I guess under the assumption that I was just a lousy dancer.

Contrary to the legend, his body felt warm against mine and as smooth as muscled satin, but he may as well have been carved of steel for all the hope I had of breaking his hold. My pulse sped up and I thought I would faint when he bent his head and I felt lips trailing over my neck. I think my heart actually stopped as he delicately kissed the skin as if tasting the pulse under the surface. It felt like my blood could sense him, as if it moved slower and thicker in my veins, waiting for him to set it free. I broke into a sweat that had nothing to do with the heat of so many bodies crowded into a small place. Was he going to kill me right there, in front of a couple of hundred witnesses?

I should have known something like this was going to happen. Every time I trusted someone, he betrayed me; every time I loved someone, she died. Since he was already dead, I guessed the pattern held true.

Id like to thank Mary for proofreading the first draft in all its typo-ridden horror, and Marlin for a place to crash while I polished it up. Thanks are also due to Anne Sowards, a great editor (any remaining mistakes are all mine), and to Louisa Edwards for thinking up the perfect title.

I knew I was in trouble as soon as I saw the obituary. The fact that it had my name on it was sort of a clue. What I didnt know was how theyd found me, and who the guy was with the sense of humor. Antonio has never been much for comedy. Ive never figured out if that has something to do with being dead, or if hes always been a morose son of a bitch.

The obit was on my office PCs screen in place of the usual travel agency logo. It looked like part of a newspaper page had been scanned and then set as the computers wallpaper, and it hadnt been there when Id gone to get a salad half an hour earlier. If I hadnt been so freaked out, Id have been impressed. I didnt know that any of Tonys goons even knew what a computer was.

I scrambled around in a filing cabinet for my gun while I read the jokers description of my gruesome death later that evening. I had a better gun at my apartment, along with a few other surprises, but going back there probably wasnt my best move. And unless I was expecting enough trouble to make it worth the risk of carrying concealed, the only thing I kept in my purse was a small canister of mace for potential muggers. After more than three years of relative safety, Id started to question the need for even that. Id gotten careless and could only hope it wasnt about to get me killed.

Under my name was a paragraph-long description of an unfortunate incident involving me, an unknown rifleman and two bullets through the head. The paper had tomorrows date, but the hit was to occur at 8:43 tonight on Peachtree Street. I glanced at my watch; it was twenty to eight, so Id been given an hours head start. That seemed too generous for Tony. My best guess for why I wasnt already dead was that killing me outright was too easy for a guy who had people killed all the time. In my case, he wanted something special.

I finally found my Smith & Wesson 3913 under a flyer for a cruise to Rio. I wondered if it was a sign. No way did I have the kind of cash to get out of the country, though, and a chubby-cheeked, blue-eyed blonde might look a little obvious next to all those sloe-eyed senhoritas. Plus, I didnt know if Tony had associates in Brazil, but I wouldnt put it past him. When youve been around long enough to remember drinking Michelangelo under the table, you make a few contacts.

I fished a pack of gum out of the gun compartment in my purse and shoved the Smith & Wesson in. It fit like it had been made for it, which it had. Id bought the gun, my first, and three of the handbags almost four years ago on the recommendation of a Fed named Jerry Sydell. Like a lot of people, hed thought I was a nut case, but since Id helped to cripple one of the biggest crime families in Philly, he was willing to give me some free advice. He helped me pick out the 9-mm semiautomatic pistol, which combined a grip small enough for my hands with the power to discourage anything on two legs. Except for the ghosts and ghoulies, hed said with a grin. Youre on your own with them. Hed also taken me to a practice range every day for two weeks, and got me to the point that, even if I still couldnt hit the side of a barn, I didnt miss it by much. Id kept up the practice sessions whenever I could afford them, so now I could definitely hit a barn if it was a big one and I was standing within about ten feet of it. I was secretly hoping Id never have to shoot anything besides a target. It wasnt my fault it didnt work out that way.

I think Jerry sort of liked me I reminded him of his eldest kid and he wanted to see me go straight. He thought Id got in with the wrong crowd when too young to know better, which was truer than he knew, then wised up and decided to turn states evidence. How he explained the fact that a twenty-year-old orphan knew all about the inner workings of a major crime family Ill never know, but it sure wasnt faith in that witchcraft crap, as he put it. Jerry didnt believe in the supernatural any of it. Since I didnt want him to lock me in a small padded cell somewhere, I didnt mention my visions, or how close hed been with the ghosts and ghoulies comment.

Ive always been kind of a ghost magnet. Maybe its part of the whole clairvoyance thing; I dont know. Tony was always careful about what he let me study I think he was afraid Id figure out some way to use my abilities against him if I knew too much so Im not very knowledgeable about my talent. Of course, it might be that my attractiveness to the spirit world is simply because I can see them: it must be a downer haunting someone who doesnt even know youre there. Not that they haunt me, exactly, but they do like showing off when Im around.

Sometimes thats not a bad thing, like with the old woman I met in an alley as a teenage runaway. I tend to see ghosts as solid much of the time, especially if they are new and powerful, so it took me a while to realize what she was. She was there to act as a sort of guardian angel over her grandson, whom shed helped to raise. She died when he was ten, and her daughters boyfriend started beating him as soon as he went to live with them. The boy ran away in less than a month. She told me that she hadnt spent a decade watching over him to abandon him now, and she was sure God wouldnt mind waiting on her a bit. At her request, I gave him enough money to get on a bus to her sisters place in San Diego before I moved on. Naturally, I didnt mention that sort of thing to Jerry. He didnt believe in anything he couldnt see, touch or put a bullet in, kind of limiting subjects for conversation. Needless to say, he also didnt believe in vampires, at least not until a couple of Tonys guys caught up with him one night and tore his throat out.

I knew what was about to happen to Jerry because I Saw his last few seconds as I was getting in the bath. As usual, I got a vivid, full-color, up-close-and-personal ticket to the carnage, which almost made me slip and break my neck on the slick bathroom floor. After I stopped shaking enough to hold a phone, I called the Witness Protection Program emergency number, but the agent who answered got suspicious when I wouldnt say how I knew what was about to happen. She said shed get a message to Jerry but didnt sound too enthused about disturbing his weekend. So I called Tonys lead thug a vamp named Alphonse and reminded him that he was supposed to find out where the government had stashed me, not risk angering the Senate by killing humans who didnt even know anything. Jerry was useless to them because his information was about to be old news.