apparently intending to wrap me up, slam me into the light pole behind me, and bury his blade in my middle. I didn’t like that plan, so I stopped him.
Actually, that’s exactly what I did—I just stopped him. I planted my feet, leaned forward at the waist, and met his shoulder with my own. When our bodies slammed together, I grabbed his right wrist with my left hand and jerked it out away from our bodies. Then I slipped my right shoulder around and under his jaw, pulling on his right arm the whole time. I ducked further and his body slid onto my shoulders in a fireman’s carry. I grapevined my right arm around one of his legs, then flung myself backward to the ground, slamming the knife-wielding idiot into the ground, and my shoulders into the idiot.
I spun around and up to my feet, never letting go of his wrist. He lay on the sidewalk, his eyes open wide and mouth flapping open and closed like a fish out of water, gasping for air. I stepped over his elbow, wedged his forearm between my legs, and twisted, using my shin as a fulcrum. The bones of his arm snapped like twigs, and his face went whiter than the full moon. He drew in a huge gulp of air to scream, but I dropped to one knee, burying my elbow in the side of his skull. His eyes rolled back in his head, and his jaw went slack as he passed out cold.
A quick scan of both sides of the street confirmed we were still alone, and no new lights were on in the apartments surrounding us, so I felt safe that we hadn’t been observed. I folded up the switchblade and slipped it into the pocket of my pants, then rifled through his pockets, emptying his wallet and leaving it on the sidewalk beside his head. To an observer, it would just look like a random mugging, but if this guy was smart, he would realize that I now knew his name and where he lived, and hopefully that would be enough to scare him off his nocturnal activities for a while.
Of course, being smart and summoning demons don’t exactly go hand in hand, so I held out only the barest hope for that. My blood rushing from the sight and my head swirling with everything I’d seen, I stood and went in search of the one person most likely to have some answers for me.
It was time to go see my uncle, Count Dracula.
* * *
—
“I know how it sounds, Luke, but I saw her.” The bourbon left in my glass was barely enough to moisten an ice cube, so I passed the tumbler over to Renfield, who poured another drink from the decanter on the side table. This Renfield, the latest in a string of manservants my uncle had that answered to the name, was efficient, if not as warm as some I’d known. But he was efficient, and he took good care of Luke, so I didn’t mind him being a bit of a cold fish. Besides, he wasn’t a psychopath, which was a marked improvement over some of the previous Renfields.
“I don’t mean to be cruel, Quincy, but you have seen a great many things since Anna’s death, and not all of them have actually been present.” Luke’s voice was mild, but laced with steel. He looked at me over the rim of his wineglass to gauge my reaction. If I wanted to get violent, he was prepared to deal with me. And he could, without even trying hard. Without magic, I was nowhere near a worthy opponent for the vampire using the name Lucas Card, and he was too close for me to get off even the quickest spell.
We sat in the living room of his flat in Brooklyn, the third floor of a modest brownstone in the middle of a nice working-class neighborhood. I once asked him why he chose Brooklyn over some of the flashier neighborhoods of New York, and he told me that a hunting ground was always best if it was heavily stocked with game no one would miss, and Brooklyn had plenty of people moving in and out all the time, so if one or two vanished, no one would notice.