Free Crossed by J. F. Lewis

to lock gazes with me, but I kept my focus low, staring at her breasts. The one I’d bitten had already regenerated. As I watched, her flesh began to gray, herwings receding. Plummeting toward Fang, she screamed, more in frustration than fear. She landed on the hood, feetfirst, with a metallic
thunk
and a distinctly less metallic
snap
. Her legs gave and she fell to one side of my car.
    “How is this possible?” She rolled away from the car, already trying to stand. “No vampire that has passed through the threshold of death and embraced undeath can—”
    “Drink the blood of a Mouser?” I completed her sentence as I landed in front of her. “Yeah, I’ve never been much of a joiner.”
    Fang roared to life behind me.
    “How?”
    “If we’re really in a dream, then anything is possible,” I lied, hoping she’d believe that rather than figuring out Fang was my
memento mori
.
    “Could the car—” she whispered, then interrupted one thought with another. “
Bien sûr que non
. I sensed magic from within his chest.
    “Is that what you did, clever boy?” She slowly stood, her legs mending as we spoke. “Did you hide your
memento mori
in your own body?”
    “Maybe.” She sensed magic inside me?
The Stone of Aeternum,
I thought.
    Last year I’d gotten into it with a demon and wound up with a magic rock that is supposed to make a vampire who finds a cure for vampirism immortal if he manages to find a cure while the stone is in his heart. I don’t go for all that magic mumbo jumbo, but I’d held on to it, just in case it actually worked. The rock technically belonged to Lord Phillip, who wanted to use it for a magic ritual to make himself more powerful, but in the meantime, he’d been willing to let me hang on to it as long as I promised to hand it over on demand. I think he was more interested than I was in whether it would work ornot. If the stone was powerful enough to throw Mommy Dearest off the scent of my real
memento mori,
off Fang, then I was even more pleased that I’d held on to it.
    She smiled at me, and our surroundings faded. She had the information she thought she wanted, and I had an edge, a tiny one, but she’d been an Emperor (Empress?) for more years than I’d been on the planet . . . and I had the sneaking suspicion I was going to need every little break I could get to take her down.

    9    

    RACHEL:

    THE WRONG SORT OF PEOPLE

    An hour before sundown, a gray Void City Department of Public Works van pulled up outside the Iversonian. A brown-haired man in a blue work suit stepped out of the passenger’s side and peered out from behind the tinted lenses of his Bono-style sunglasses directly at my hiding spot in the open parking lot across the way. He was slightly tubby, but cute in a fun-to-hang-out-with-but-I-wouldn’t-do-him sort of way, and seeing him brought out a sigh. I didn’t need to see the little name tags sewed onto his work suit to know that his name was Melvin or that he worked for the Mage Guild.
    He waved at me before yelling across the street.
    “I’m just doing a standard sweep. Will I find anything?”
    “Nothing of mine, but there’s an assload of weird crap I don’t recognize. Soul magic or some such.”
    “That’ll be the Iversonian’s work.” Melvin worked his way across the road in grids. I watched him, admiring his attention to detail, his craft. Kind of a turn-on really, seeing him in action. Fifteen minutes later, he stopped on my side of the road, breathing a little hard, a thin layer of sweat beading on hisforehead. “True immortals’ powers range nearly as far afield as vampires’. The Iversonian is good with the trickier stuff, but none of this is leveled at Winter, only at folks who want to mess with Iver’s place or who become violent.”
    “So Winter picked this place so he could take advantage of the Iversonian’s well-laid protective countermeasures?”
    “It’s cheaper than paying the Guild for the same level of