Free Laws of the Blood 2: Partners by Susan Sizemore

us the wrong sacrifice, didn’t you? Maybe I should eat your brain. Or let the Angel take your heart.”
    The Angel already had his heart, but not to eat. The Disciple knew the Angel would not take him that way. They were lovers now. He had taken nothing but the Angel’s blood for months. It burned in him, purified him. He was not ready yet. There was much burning left to endure, but he was certain he would not be merely the lowly Disciple forever. The Prophet and the Demon would not control the fate of the Angel forever. The Disciple would save him.
    But until then . . .
    “I brought the strongest one I could find for the last sacrifice,” he told them with his usual humility. “I did the best I could.”
    “Leave him alone. He did what we told him to do,” the Prophet told the Demon. “Maybe that is the problem, she was too strong,” the Prophet added. He ran thick fingers through his beard. It was his way of showing he was thinking deep thoughts. “Perhaps too strong for the link between the Vessel, the Angel, and myself.”
    The demon released him. The Disciple was dizzy and aching. He scurried backward, away from the Angel and toward the sanctuary door. “Shall I find another for the Vessel to kill?”
    “Yes!” the Demon shouted. He waved his scaly arms excitedly. “Go. Now.”
    The Disciple looked to the Prophet, who continued thinking his deep thoughts but nodded eventually. “Yes,”he said. “Take the Vessel with you, and find us a less toxic sacrifice this time.”
     
    There was a hole in the city. Char could see the blank spot in her memory of the landscape when she woke. Then she opened her eyes, and the details faded too quickly as her mind adjusted to being back in the solid world. The point of attempting to dream walk last day had been to find the man who’d shot her. No luck there. No mental trail or trace came to her, either from the man with the shotgun or the dissipated spirit of the murder victim. She found something when she turned her attention to the city, but now she wasn’t sure what it was. All she had was the memory of being thrilled and frightened at some discovery.
    The memory of having found something dire didn’t do her much good. Dire was supposed to be SOP for a vampire cop. Or so Marguerite had assured her when she’d taken Char through the change. This was Char’s first exposure to dire, and it left her more confused than energized for the hunt.
    She got out of bed, frustrated and grumpy, and went to take a shower. She saw no evidence left of last night’s attack when she checked her naked skin under the hot flow of water. The shower helped wake her up, but fully waking up also made the almost-memories more distant and dreamlike.
    She got dressed slowly in wrinkled clothes out of her suitcase and thought about what to do with the night. She needed to find Daniel. She wanted to find her attacker. She wondered about the dead woman andwhether the murder, the attacker, and the young vampire were connected. Probably. There didn’t tend to be a lot of coincidences when you dealt with magic.
    “Magic.” There was that word again. “Psychic,” she said. “I meant to say psychic.” They were not the same thing, which she knew very well. Then why had she said one when she meant the other? “Because I had a bad day’s sleep and I’m spitting out shotgun shot like they’re hairballs and I’m staying in my old lover’s place in a bed that’s way too big and empty and if I don’t stop talking to myself somebody is going to get the bright idea to put me away and get themselves killed for their trouble!”
    Char stopped talking long enough to breathe, then put her hand over her mouth to keep from continuing to rave out her vehemence at the world in general and last twenty-four hours in particular. “Forty-eight,” she corrected. She looked at herself in the dresser mirror and admitted, “Actually, it’s been a bad week. Maybe I should have gone to Tucson instead