Soul Taken (Mercy Thompson 13)

I called Tad while I opened the safe.

“On my way,” Tad said. “Adam texted that you needed me.” He yawned.

I talked to him while I took down my chosen weapon. I considered bringing other weapons, too. In the end, I only added my usual concealed carry gun. If I needed more firepower, the walking stick would serve me as well as anything.

“I see,” Tad said. “I’ll be there in ten.”

Adam had come up while I’d been on the phone. He reached over my shoulder and took a rokushakubo from the safe. There are many varieties of bo, and Adam had two or three favorites—all of which he kept in the safe. This one was a little longer than he was tall (as the name suggested) and made of unvarnished hickory. About a foot from each end were three one-inch bands of steel.

He glanced at my weapon.

“It’s not polite to return a gift,” he said.

I looked down at the silk belt I held in my hands. “I don’t think it was a gift,” I told him. “I think he brought it here for safekeeping. Bonarata took it from him once, and he didn’t want to give him the opportunity to take it again.”

Any museum curator would have cringed at the way I wrapped it around my waist and tied it. But I didn’t think Wulfe would mind. It was a belt, after all.

“Are you going to tell me where we’re going?” he asked.

“Benton City,” I said. “The vineyard where we killed Frost.”

15

Benton City was a small town ten miles on the other side of the Tri-Cities from where we lived. Most of the people who lived there worked in the Tri-Cities or out in the nuclear-cleanup complex of the Hanford Site. The rest of them grew fruit or made wine.

It was about three in the morning when Adam drove to the abandoned vineyard in the maze of hilly agricultural land surrounding the little town. The property was still covered with gray skeletons of grape vines that had been left to die. It was unusual that good grape-growing land had been left to lie fallow like this for so long.

But on the site of the burned-out winery, someone had recently built a very large house. The land around the house was ripped up and scored—obviously where someone was still working on proper landscaping—but the house itself looked finished.

Anyone could have been building a house, of course. But Adam had checked the county records and found that the land was owned by an Italian company. If I had any doubts that our vampires were there, the big black helicopter sitting on a pad beside the house eliminated them. The helicopter also meant Bonarata was there, but we’d known that was probable.

Adam drove on about a quarter of a mile and pulled into the property via a side road demarcating the line between the dead vines and live ones. The road was graveled and wide enough for a car and a half to drive on it, but there was cleared ground on either side of it.

The ground sloped—as good vineyards do—and we drove over a hump of land before we stopped. Adam parked out of sight of the house, next to one of the rows of dead grape vines, and we got out.

I heard a nighthawk cry and the distant sound of the interstate traffic. Coyotes exchanged a few barking yips—and when I replied, they showed up to check us out. An adult and three half-grown pups. One of the latter looked as though it wanted to investigate further, but the adult headed out for better hunting grounds, and the pups followed her.

“You’re still sure that the Soul Taker will come out and find us?” Adam asked.

I nodded and thumped my temple—not the side the pumpkin had hit—and said, “It knows we are here. It wants me. It will come.”

The only question was if the Harvester—the Soul Taker and Wulfe—would come alone.

We had been there for about twenty minutes when the helicopter engines roared to life. I looked at Adam, who shrugged. He didn’t know what the helicopter meant, either—except that the game was probably ready to begin.

“I love you,” I told him.

He smiled and set his steel-shod bo against his shoulder to get it out of the way so he could kiss me.

“Very touching,” said Bonarata, his accent both faintly British and Italian.

We’d hoped for Wulfe and the Soul Taker alone, but Adam had thought it unlikely.

Neither Adam nor I reacted to Bonarata’s presence, letting the kiss come to a natural conclusion a few seconds after Bonarata spoke. Then I stepped back and let Adam do the talking.

“You are trespassing on our territory without permission,” Adam said.

It wasn’t that Bonarata didn’t look dangerous; he just didn’t look like a monster. He was maybe four inches taller than Adam and had a boxer’s square build, a big man who looked like a brawler. His nose had been broken and badly set—probably when he’d still been human. The skin around his left eye had been split and scarred. Even in the hand-tailored suit that he wore, he looked like hired muscle.