Dying Bites Read online

  “I’m a vampire,” Cassius says. “Not a demon, not a creature of pure evil, not a figment of some writer’s imagination. I drink blood, I’m extremely allergic to sunlight, I’m effectively immortal. I’m a supernatural creature, not a natural one, and if you’re going to survive here, you’re going to have to learn how to deal with beings like me, because I’m far from the only one.”

  And, just like that, I believe him.

  “Vampires,” I say calmly. “Lots?”

  “Thirty-seven percent of the population. Worldwide.”

  “Barely a third. How’s the war going?”

  His eyes fade to normal. His fangs recede. “It was over a long time ago,” he says. He straightens up from his feral crouch, seems almost embarrassed. “You lost.”

  “So the other sixty or so percent is what, livestock?”

  “Forty-three are lycanthropes. Nineteen are golems.”

  “Why am I here?”

  “Because one of the ways this world is different from yours is in the sickness you call insanity. Most supernatural creatures are immune to disease, our minds as well as our bodies. Only human beings are experienced in dealing with madness, and, well . . .”

  “We’re hard to come by?” I’ve already done the math. “One percent. That’s all that’s left of us, you bastard? One percent?”

  “Less than that,” he says quietly. “Your species numbers under a million. And one of them is slaughtering my people.”

  “Why should I care?”

  “Because catching this madman,” Cassius replies, “is the only hope you have of ever seeing your home again.”

  “Dying Bites is wacky, unpredictable, fresh, and amazing. I would kill to write as well as DD Barant. Seriously.”

  —Nancy Holder, author of Pretty Little Devils

  DYING BITES

  Book One of the Bloodhound Files

  DD Barant

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks

  NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  DYING BITES

  Copyright © 2009 by DD Barant.

  Excerpt from Death Blows copyright © 2009 by DD Barant.

  All rights reserved.

  For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York,

  NY 10010.

  ISBN: 0-312-94258-3

  EAN: 978-0-312-94258-8

  Printed in the United States of America

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / July 2009

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth

  Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ONE

  I think about monsters a lot.

  Real ones, I mean, not Frankenstein or Dracula or Godzilla. I work for the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, where I use my degree in criminal psychology to help profile offenders; my area of expertise is homicide-fixated nonstandard patterning. It’s my job to figure out why the crazy ones do what they do and who they’re going to do it to next. This makes me Miss Popular at cocktail parties—until my third tequila, when certain details that really shouldn’t be heard on a full stomach somehow become the punch lines to jokes of incredibly bad taste.

  I usually don’t get invited back.

  Which is why I’m home alone, again, nursing a throbbing hangover and trying to get back to sleep. I’ve got a bad case of the 3:00 A.M. guilts—you know, when you lie in bed awake and replay all those things you didn’t do right? Because, as we all know, nothing solves insomnia like a nice warm glass of regret, depression, and self-loathing.

  Okay, I don’t really hate myself. But I do piss myself off—quite a bit, actually—and sometimes I need a good, stern talking-to about important elements in my life. I think I was criticizing my own taste in clothes when I finally fell asleep.

  It’s funny. Dreams can be intimately revealing, or incomprehensible. They can be ridiculous or terrifying, deeply significant or inconsequential. I find other people’s dreams intriguing, because extracting meaning from the psychological jumble of a healthy mind is similar in many ways to finding coherence in the fractured mindscape of a psychotic.

  But no matter what they represent or how scrambled they are, dreams are just that—dreams. They aren’t real. But to those whose grasp on reality isn’t quite as solid, a dream can be a message from another dimension, a psychic telegram from their own personal God. It can change their entire life.

  I guess that makes me crazy, too.

  The dream starts simply enough. It’s not unusual to dream about your work—I know a shoe salesman who kept having nightmares about ogres who came in demanding sandals—so for me, a dream about catching a killer can be pretty mundane. I’m sitting at my desk doing paperwork, when a colleague walks in and tells me I’m wanted in the Director’s office. I get up, walk down a hall, and knock on the Director’s door. A voice I don’t recognize tells me to come in.

  On the other side of the door is my bedroom. That’s okay, because I’m wearing my nightshirt. There are two men sitting on my bed, quite formally, backs straight and their legs together. The one on the left is my boss; his name is Robert Miller and he’s spoken to me maybe three times in my entire career. He looks vaguely annoyed—but then, that’s the only expression I’ve ever seen on his face.

  The other man is a stranger. He’s dressed much like the Director, in a plain black business suit, but I can tell at a glance there’s something very unusual about him. Sharp eyes, hooked nose, dark hair slicked back, bony, angular features. I have the immediate, strong feeling that he’s an undertaker from another country—somewhere in Eastern Europe, maybe, or some corner of Mongolia.

  “Agent Valchek,” says Miller. “You’re being reassigned, effective immediately. This is your liaison. He’ll get you settled.” Miller doesn’t introduce the man, and I don’t ask.

  “You can bring three things with you,” the man says. He has no accent, but somehow that just reinforces the idea that he’s a foreigner. In fact, I’m sure this is the first time he’s ever been to my country. “The three things you feel are most instrumental to you doing your job. Choose carefully.”

  I’m pretty straightforward. I grab my handgun, my laptop, and the carton of ammunition I keep under my bed. In typical dream fashion, the undertaker is now standing beside a door in my bedroom wall that wasn’t there before. The Director has vanished. The undertaker opens the door and motions me to step through, cautioning me to close my eyes for my own safety.

  “Of course, yeah,” I say. “Thanks.”

  The first sensation I’m aware of after stepping through the doorway is the cold wooden floor under my bare feet. There’s a strange noise behind me, like a recording of an explosion being played backward. I open my eyes.

  I’m standing in an office, one very much like the Director’s. The blinds are drawn. A green-shaded lamp throws a pool of light on the desk, and leaning against the front of the desk, arms crossed in front of him, is a young man. He’s dressed in standard FBI-wear, black business suit and polished Oxfords. He appears to be around eighteen, handsome in an innocent kind of way, and has curly blond hair that makes him look more like a surfer than a Federal agent.

  I note three things in quick succession:

  One—I’m still in my nightshirt.

  Two—I have a loaded gun in my hand.

  Three—I’m not asleep.

  I file num
ber one as embarrassing but not vital, double-check number three and confirm my first impression, and bring point number two to Mr. Surfer’s immediate attention by aiming it at his chest.

  “Where the hell am I?” I snarl.

  “In my office,” he says. “My name is David Cassius. We’re going to be working together, Jace.”

  The gun doesn’t seem to impress him. It’s a Ruger Super Redhawk Alaskan, a short-barreled revolver chambered with .454 ammunition—it packs a bigger wallop than a Magnum .44, and is sometimes even used for big-game hunting. It can take down a grizzly or a bull moose, and it took me every day for six months at the firing range to learn how to handle the recoil. Cassius looks at it like it’s a toy.

  “I understand your confusion,” he says. His voice is strong, deep, confident, not the voice of a young man at all. I have a good ear for accents and I’m trained to identify over a hundred regional differences, but his escapes me.

  “Actually,” he continues, “you’re not supposed to be fully cognizant yet. I don’t suppose I can convince you you’re still dreaming?”

  “Only if you turn into my father and tell me you’re disappointed in my grades.” I half-expect exactly that to happen, but Cassius only smiles. It’s a boyish, engaging smile, and I bet it makes the sorority girls go all weak and giggly. I seriously consider putting a big hole in it.

  “No, I didn’t think so. All right, let’s take this one step at a time. How do you think you got here?”

  “Where I come from, the one with the gun asks the questions,” I snap. “Where’s your partner?” The undertaker is nowhere in sight.

  “You probably mean the . . . one who brought you here. He’s at another location; I elected to be the one to officially greet you, but I was told you’d be in a more receptive state.”

  I’m getting it now. “Okay. So someone drugged me at the party, I was scooped from my apartment, and you expected a little more drool and a lot less firepower. Are we up to speed?”

  “Getting there.” His smile widens, going from gee-aren’t-I-cute to something approaching genuine amusement. “Keep going—I want to see where you end up.”

  “You’re a government spook,” I say flatly. “The Bureau doesn’t play games like this. CIA, NSA, one of the black-ops outfits that doesn’t show up in the budget. You drugged me, hauled me out here . . .”

  I stop. He waits.

  “Oh, crap,” I say. “My gun isn’t loaded, is it?”

  “See for yourself.”

  I do. All six chambers are full. I snap the cylinder back into place and look up, more confused than ever—and starting to be scared. Scenarios involving me being turned into a brainwashed assassin start to percolate in my brain. I level the gun at him again and say, “Full explanation. Now.” I’m close to convincing myself he’ll say Kumquat, and I’ll turn into a glassy-eyed zombie.

  “You haven’t been drugged. I am, as you thought, a government operative—NSA, in fact. You’ve been brought here because we need someone in your field of expertise—the tracking and apprehension of mentally fractured killers.”

  It’s an odd way to put it, but I guess “mentally fractured” is as accurate as “psychotic.” “What’s the matter with your own specialists?” I ask. “Or do you just need someone disposable?” I have visions of me tracking down some Senator’s son who’s gone off his meds, only to wind up in a shallow grave myself once I’ve caught him.

  “You’re far from disposable,” Cassius says mildly. “As a matter of fact, at the moment you possess one of the most valuable minds on the planet. We’re hoping you’ll use it to help us. Now ask the important question.”

  Which one? I want to scream. Am I about to die? Have all those years of making myself think like a psychotic finally turned me into one? Why are you so calm with a loaded revolver held by an extremely stressed FBI agent pointed at your heart?

  No.

  “If I wasn’t drugged,” I say, “then how did I get here?”

  “Through that,” Cassius says, and glances behind me.

  I’m not stupid. I keep the gun on him and move my body to the side, so I can flick my own glance from him to what’s behind me. I’d come through some kind of door, so that’s what I expect—but what I see instead is a blank white wall, with some kind of arcane designs scrawled on it in reddish brown. The designs are outlined in a rough semicircle around six feet in diameter—

  I’ve never seen anyone move that fast.

  It’s still a stupid thing to do. It’s virtually impossible to take a gun away from the person who’s holding it on you as long as the shooter follows one simple rule: don’t get too close to your target.

  I haven’t.

  Cassius actually manages to grab the barrel of the Ruger before I pull the trigger. The first bullet takes him in the sternum, and the next three are placed within inches of that. I’m a very good shot.

  The sheer kinetic energy throws him backward across the room. He lands on his back on the desk, arms thrown to either side.

  “Damn,” I whisper. “Just another crazy—”

  And then he sits up.

  There’s no blood on him, but his shirt and jacket have ragged, gaping holes—and all I can see through those holes is pale, unmarked skin. No body armor, no bulletproof vest. No way.

  He looks more annoyed than anything. Thinking back on it later, I’m pretty sure that’s the real reason I put the next two shots into his face.

  I can actually see the impacts this time. His skin dimples like an invisible finger just poked him—once in the cheek, once in the forehead—and then the flattened remains of the slugs fall onto the carpet. I wonder why the force didn’t drive him backward like the first time, and then I realize he’s braced himself by holding on to the edges of the desk. The desk is large and solid, unlike my present grasp of reality.

  The gun is empty, but I’ve got a carton of ammunition in my other hand. And a laptop tucked under my arm. Right now, they both seem pretty useless.

  Cassius gets off the desk. He sighs. “If I was going to hurt you,” he says reasonably, “now would be the time, wouldn’t it?”

  He looks down at the shredded remains of his tie. He sighs again. “Please,” he says, and motions to a leather sofa along one wall. “Sit. Or perhaps you’d like to discharge your weapon again?”

  My mind is desperately trying to find some explanation that fits the facts, but it’s not doing so good. In fact, the idea that I’m still dreaming is looking better and better. I stride over to the sofa, toss down my gun, put down the laptop and place the ammo on top of it. Then I sit down, cross my arms, try to ignore the fact that the only thing I’m wearing is an oversize T-shirt with a picture of a panda on it, and glare at Cassius. “Okay. Talk.”

  “I apologize for trying to disarm you. It was rude of me.”

  “If you’re looking for an apology in return, you’re not going to get one.”

  “What a surprise. This isn’t your world, Agent Valchek.” His tone is suddenly noticeably colder—I think I finally managed to piss him off. “I realize that in your world, magic is something only children believe in. Here, it is real. You were brought through an interdimensional portal by extremely powerful sorcery, and it was not done lightly. We need your help.”

  I smile, and shake my head. “Okay, now you’ve gone too far. Some kind of covert spy operation I might have bought, but this? Over the top. So now I’m thinking practical joke, with really excellent special effects. New TV show, maybe? Special blanks in my gun, maybe hypnosis—”

  And then he moves again, in that ultrafast way only animals can, and his face is about a foot away from mine.

  “Does this look like special effects?” he says, and grins.

  The grin isn’t meant to be friendly. He’s showing me his teeth.

  His incisors are sharp—and as I watch, they get longer. His eyes—a very startling blue—turn bloodred.

  I swallow. “Kind of,” I say. “But only when I’m on the other side of
the screen.”

  “Welcome to this side,” he says. “I’m a vampire. Not a demon, not a creature of pure evil, not a figment of some writer’s imagination. I drink blood, I’m extremely allergic to sunlight, I’m effectively immortal. I’m a supernatural creature, not a natural one, and if you’re going to survive here, you’re going to have to learn how to deal with beings like me—because I’m far from the only one.”

  And, just like that, I believe him. The human mind always searches for order, no matter how chaotic or insane events become—we want to believe in a pattern, any pattern, and when somebody offers you one in the middle of a storm of craziness, you grab it and hang on until something better comes along.

  “Vampires,” I say calmly. “Lots?”

  “Thirty-seven percent of the population. Worldwide.”

  “Barely a third. How’s the war going?”

  His eyes fade to normal. His fangs recede. “It was over a long time ago,” he says. He straightens up from his feral crouch, seems almost embarrassed. “You lost.”

  “So the other sixty or so percent is what—livestock?”

  “Forty-three are lycanthropes. Nineteen are golems.”

  “Werewolves and living clay. How’s that work? The bloodsuckers and werewolves take turns biting each other while the Jewish statues referee?”

  “We aren’t monsters, Jace. We drink the blood of animals, not men. We shop in supermarkets, we drive cars. This world isn’t so different from your own.”

  “Why am I here?” I shout. Bulletproof vampire or not, I’m about ready to rip the truth out of him with my bare hands.

  “Because one of the ways this world is different from yours is in the sickness you call insanity. Most supernatural creatures are immune to disease—our minds as well as our bodies. Only human beings are experienced in dealing with madness, and—well . . .”