Boundary Crossed (Boundary Magic #1)(30)
Quinn thought that over for a long moment, then nodded. “Sort of. Younger vampires have to obey not just their own dominus, but any dominus who obeys him. So it’s more like . . . a lineage of obedience.”
“So where did Victor and Darcy fall within the pecking order?”
“They both finished their service a couple of years ago, and they pledged troth to a vampire named Kirby,” Quinn explained. “And Kirby belongs to Itachi. Wait, we’re here.”
He pulled to a stop in front of a perfectly ordinary wood-frame building that had once been a single-family residence. Someone had converted it into two apartments with separate mailboxes, I saw. There was a third mailbox for a basement apartment, along with a dark staircase leading down on the side of the house.
When we got out of the car, Quinn immediately walked around to the Toyota’s back bumper, looked around a little, and popped the trunk.
Quinn’s trunk was packed. The top layer was camp blankets and collapsible chairs, the kind of thing you’d have at a picnic or an outdoor concert. He moved these aside and revealed piles of more sinister supplies, including several power tools and a lidless shoebox full of stakes. I noted with surreal detachment that the shoebox full of stakes had the Luther Shoes logo printed on its side. Quinn pulled out two wooden stakes and handed me one. It was a simple piece of hardwood, about the length of my forearm, machine-sharpened to a rounded point.
“The wooden stake thing is real, huh?” I asked, turning it over in my hand. Frankly, I would rather have had a gun.
“Sort of,” Quinn replied. “To kill a vampire, you have to cut off the head or completely destroy the heart. Theoretically you could do that with bullets, if you can get the vampire to hold still, but these”—he held up his wooden stake—“are traditional, which maybe gives them a little bit of magic. More importantly,” he added, grinning, “Itachi had them hexed by a witch in Denver. If you can get one in a vampire’s heart, the stake will do the rest. We call ’em shredders.”
“I thought magic never works against itself,” I objected.
“You’re thinking too broadly. I can’t use my magic against someone else’s magic, so I can’t turn you or a werewolf into a vampire. But a witch can hex a stake to shred what it touches, and if that’s a physical heart . . .” He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a vampire’s.”
At the bottom of the stairs was a door that looked like solid steel. A whole line of keyholes ran up the side, each one representing a dead bolt.
Quinn leaned his weight back so he could kick in the door. Could vampires break their feet? “Quinn, wait—” I began. To my surprise, though, he struck the side of the door with the hinges. The door burst loose from its frame, although the side with all the locks held. Quinn shook his head. “Typical vampires,” he said dismissively. “They invest in a dozen hard-core deadbolts, but it doesn’t occur to them to reinforce the hinges. Come on.” He pushed on the open side of the door, which caved inward with a screech of metallic protest. Quinn turned and slipped sideways through the twelve-inch crack. I followed. The interior of the room beyond was dark, and I heard the brush of a hand on the wall as Quinn flipped the light switch.
The basement apartment opened straight onto a relatively large living room, with a kitchenette to the right and a dark hallway in the back left corner. It looked like every college apartment I’d ever seen—which, admittedly, wasn’t very many. The carpet was worn, the furniture looked pre-owned several times over, and no attempt had been made to tidy up the place or even decorate it—unless you counted the curling poster of Van Gogh’s Vase with Twelve Sunflowers, and I would have bet money that it had come with the apartment. The whole place smelled like stale body odor and ancient Chinese takeout, which had probably come with the apartment, too.
“Wait here,” Quinn told me, and there was a blur of movement toward the back hallway, way too fast for me to follow in the dim light, although I wasn’t sure I could have followed it in the middle of a sunny field, either. Before I could even register his disappearance, he was back in the same spot. It was annoying.
“Empty,” Quinn said. “As expected.” He wandered forward.
“What do we do now?” I asked.
“Search.” Quinn looked around, assessing our surroundings. “There are two bedrooms at the end of the hall. You go left; I’ll go right. Then we’ll work our way back out toward the door. Look for anything that might tell us where she could be: names of friends, receipts from restaurants or hotels, that kind of thing.”
I nodded. I’d searched houses before. “Do we have gloves?” I asked. Without comment, Quinn reached into the pocket of his leather jacket, pulled out a pair of surgical gloves, and handed them to me. “Thanks.”
The bedroom on the left was small, with a double bed and a nightstand crammed into a corner, and clothes covering the remaining floor space. There was no other furniture, and the tiny doorless closet was the size of a refrigerator. Judging by the posters of naked women and all the men’s clothes strewn on the floor, Victor and Darcy had kept separate bedrooms, and this one had been his. The musty, unwashed smell was stronger in here.
Still feeling silly, I pushed my stake through my two front belt loops so I could put on the surgical gloves. Then I used a foot to push around the clothes on the floor, picking up all the pants to search the pockets. After five minutes I had found a few empty packs of cigarettes, some change and crumpled dollar bills, and a handful of receipts for gas stations and seedy bars. I kept the receipts and left the rest.