One Grave at a Time

Twenty-three

Bones was in front of me in a blink, holding two fistfuls of burning sage. I held the woman with one arm and tried to reach for my own sage stash with the other, but then something heavy slammed into the back of my head hard enough to make me lose my balance. Bones whirled, grabbing us both and backing us into the wall, his body and that barrier a protective shield from any additional attacks.

“Door,” I muttered, seeing over his shoulder what I’d been brained with this time. “Fucker hit me with the bedroom door!”

“Get out,” an enraged voice hissed.

Blood wet my hair before the wound closed on itself, but that initial flash of dizziness was gone, leaving me good and mad. That only increased when all the broken dishes became airborne and thudded into Bones’s body like glass knives.

The woman didn’t scream, but she made a horrible keening noise, squeezing her eyes shut. “No, no, no,” she began to chant.

I managed to free my arms from the tight wedge Bones had us in enough to pull out some sage and light it. In the time it took me to do that, Kramer had blasted the couch into Bones. I felt his pain flaring along my subconscious as the impact drove those glass shards farther into his back, but Bones just braced himself, absorbing the blow without shifting his weight even an inch. Then he shot the unseen ghost a feral grin.

“Is that all you’ve got?”

Kramer howled in fury, outing his position even though he hadn’t manifested in appearance yet. I took aim and threw, using enough force that the sage went all the way across the room. Another howl sounded, pained this time, making me smile with vicious satisfaction. I pelted another handful in that direction, but Kramer must have moved, because the only sounds that followed were rattling from the cabinet doors he ripped off and began to chuck at us. One of them hit Helsing’s carrier, making my cat screech, but it was made of sturdy material and protected him from the impact.

“Kitty,” I urged Bones, still pinned too tightly to the wall to get him myself.

Bones didn’t move, but he stared at the carrier, his aura sparking like he’d just set off invisible fireworks. The carrier slid across the wall, pushing past the wood and glass in its path, until it was close enough for Bones to hook his foot around it and tuck it under the shelter of our legs.

I didn’t have time to admire the use of his power before pounding began on the apartment door, followed by a woman’s voice yelling, “This is too much, Francine. I’m calling the police this time!” Then Elisabeth burst through one of the walls, Fabian following closely behind her.

“Kramer,” she shouted. “Where are you, schmutz?”

Air swirled in tight circles near the kitchen, growing darker, until the tall, thin form of the Inquisitor appeared.

“Here, hure,” he hissed at her.

I was shocked when Elisabeth flew toward Kramer and started swinging. Unlike what happened when Bones or I attempted that, her blows didn’t harmlessly go through him. The Inquisitor’s head snapped to the side at the haymaker punch she landed. Then he was almost brought to his knees by the merciless kick she smashed into his groin. Kramer couldn’t be harmed by anyone with flesh, but clearly that same rule didn’t apply when it came to another noncorporeal being whaling on him.

Throughout all this, the woman—Francine?—seemed to be lost in her own private hell, murmuring, “No, no, no,” in an endless, ragged litany. Over Bones’s shoulder, I saw that Kramer had started to turn the tables on Elisabeth. He landed a vicious kick to her midsection that made her double over. Fabian jumped on the Inquisitor’s back, kicking and punching, but Kramer grabbed him and flung him off so effortlessly, Fabian disappeared through the apartment wall. Guess ghosts were similar to vampires, with age accounting for greater strength. Elisabeth and Kramer were nearly the same in spectral years; but Fabian was much younger, and from the looks of it, not nearly a match for the Inquisitor.

“We need to leave,” Bones said low. “Now, while he’s distracted.”

Then Bones turned his head, shouting, “Charles, to the house!” loud enough to make my eardrums vibrate.

But seeing Elisabeth getting the crap kicked out of her made me hesitate when Bones tightened his arms around us with obvious intent. Elisabeth’s gaze locked with mine for a split second. Then she threw her arms around Kramer, bear-hugging him despite the brutal pounding she received to her midsection in return. Fabian flitted around, desperately trying to intervene, only to be swatted aside like a fly.

I got her message, grabbing Helsing’s carrier and whispering, “Now!” to Bones.

The front door opened the instant we reached it, allowing us to exit without ripping a hole in the wall. I hadn’t opened it. I had one arm around his neck and the other gripping the cat carrier. Bones’s hands were likewise full, supporting me and the woman while he blasted us away faster than I could’ve flown. We must have been only a dark blur to the neighbor in the outdoor hallway, on her cell phone describing the noises in the woman’s apartment to the police, it sounded like.

Then we were well past the building, giving me only a moment to note that Spade’s car and the one we’d driven in were no longer in the parking lot before we were too high for me to make out the different vehicles. Now there was even less chance for Kramer to follow us. From how Bones seemed to have loaded up his jets, we only needed another minute or two more before the ghost wouldn’t be able to discern in which direction we’d flown away.

The downside was that this had shaken the woman out of her trancelike state. She screamed as fast as she could draw breath, but with her eyes squeezed tightly shut, I couldn’t green-eye her into a more calm state of mind.

“You’re okay, you’re okay!” I shouted to no effect. Either she didn’t hear me above the whooshing of wind from Bones’s speed, or she strongly disagreed. With everything that had happened to her, I couldn’t blame her. When we got back to the apartment, I promised myself, I’d give her a tall glass of whatever liquor she wanted. On second thought, make that the whole bottle.

Yet even then, it wouldn’t be enough to couch the devastating news I’d have to deliver: that the nightmare she’d experienced wasn’t going to end unless we caught Kramer, and she’d be part of the lure we would use to attempt that.

Francine sat on the couch, a glass candle filled with smoldering sage in one hand and a mostly empty bottle of red wine in the other. The bottle had been full when I began to explain about Kramer, the other women who were even now going through what she’d experienced, and the part about Bones and me being vampires. Flying Francine out of her apartment kinda let on that we weren’t human, so there was no sense in trying to keep that secret while telling her everything else. Spade, Denise, and my mother got here about an hour after we did, but so Francine didn’t feel like she was being ganged up on, only Bones, I, and Tyler were with her at first. Everyone else was in their respective town houses.

I didn’t know if it was the alcohol or the suggestion Bones had planted earlier in her mind that she could trust us, but Francine was a lot calmer than I expected her to be at these revelations. It was possible she was in shock, and most of what I said didn’t register to her, but her thoughts weren’t in line with that. She had a few token moments of “vampires don’t exist” and “this can’t be happening,” but overall she seemed to accept that what we were telling her was true. Three weeks of being tormented by an invisible entity had evidently disabused her of the idea that the paranormal didn’t exist.

“I knew I wasn’t crazy,” was what she said when I finished speaking. “No one believed me when I told them what was happening. For a little while, I tried to pretend they were right. That I was doing all these things to myself through multiple personality disorder or whatever other psychosis applied, but I knew better.”

Francine glanced down at the wine bottle and let out a jagged laugh. “This is my first drink since all this started. My friends already thought I’d just snapped because of—of other events. I didn’t want them to add alcoholism into their rationalization that what I described couldn’t really be happening to me.”

“What other events?” Bones asked at once.

She balked, and I hastened to add, “We don’t mean to pry, but it might help us find the other two women before it’s too late.”

Francine let out a long sigh, scratching her hand through her sunshine-colored hair before she spoke.

“My mom died about six months ago. Dad passed on when I was really little, so she was all I had growing up. It really messed me up, which was way too much drama for my boyfriend, so he moved on to greener pastures. Then right before he started showing up, someone broke into my apartment and killed my cat. I mean, what kind of sicko does that? They didn’t even steal anything, just killed her and left!”

“That’s awful,” Tyler breathed. He hugged Dexter as he spoke, the dog in his usual spot on Tyler’s lap.

“So sorry for everything,” I murmured. I meant it, but the clinical part of me analyzed this against what I knew about serial killers in general and Kramer in particular. Francine and Elisabeth didn’t really look alike aside from both being Caucasians in their later twenties, so that wasn’t a trail to follow, and aside from the cat murder, everything else Francine related was, sadly, what I would expect. Francine didn’t have many close ties left, making her more appealing to a stalker like Kramer. It was harder to isolate and terrorize someone who had a strong support network around her.

“Looking back, do you think Kramer might have been the actual culprit behind your cat’s death?” Bones asked, zeroing in on the same oddity that bothered me.

Francine rubbed her forehead wearily. “I don’t think so. The person broke the lock on my front door to get in. Did it while I was at work, and most people in my building are gone during the day, too, so no one saw it happen. Kramer never broke anything to get in. He just . . . showed up.” Watery smile. “And then broke everything inside, but never the locks.”

“Destruction of the witch’s familiar,” Bones murmured. His mouth twisted. “Animals as familiars were one of the precepts set forth in many witch trials, and cats were commonly associated as a familiar. This could be nothing more than coincidence . . . or perhaps it’s the accomplice’s first test of loyalty.”

Breaking and entering, plus murdering something innocent for no reason other than warped superstition? Yep, sounded like just the warm-up Kramer might use for his human apprentice. Furthermore, Kramer had to know that animals could sense his presence. He’d tried to kill Dexter the first time Tyler summoned him. Poor dog still had that cast on his back leg, and Helsing would have been in worse shape if not for some lucky breaks. Getting rid of any pets his targets owned meant those pets could never warn their owners of Kramer’s presence before he wanted it to be known.

Prick.

Francine blinked back tears. “So it’s because of me that my cat was killed?”

“You’re not responsible for any of this,” I told her firmly. “Kramer is. Him, and whoever the shit is that’s helping him.”

“But you’re going to stop them, right?”

I had to glance away from the poignant hope in Francine’s face before I promised all sorts of things I wasn’t sure I could deliver on.

“We’re sure going to try,” I said, meeting Bones’s steady dark gaze, “and you just gave us a new lead to start on.”