by Chloe Garner
“I’m not that much better off,” Tina said. “I mean, I am. I am. I have savings, I could get a job if I wanted to, I could support myself not that much differently than I did before my parents died, but… The cost of feeding myself…”
“It makes you insecure,” Hunter said, very earnest and quiet. “I know about that.”
“I don’t like being a parasite,” Tina said. “And I don’t like that I survive at Tell’s leisure. Even if I do trust him completely, and I do, I don’t like being that person.”
“Is this about the necklace or is this about something else?” Hunter asked. “Because if it’s about money…”
“Don’t you dare,” Tina said, holding up a finger. “Don’t you dare tell me that I don’t have to worry about it. I know that it feels trivial to the two of you, but it bothers me, and you can’t buy away that feeling.”
Hunter shifted, dropping his shoulder down onto the bed as he continued to prop up his head.
“I don’t know how to help you, then,” he said. “The world is always hard for people who don’t have anything. Human and vampire alike. And it usually takes time and planning and some luck to end up where we are, though having Ginger’s coattails to ride on was a bit of it for a while, there. All I can say is that neither one of us have any intention of letting you live like that, and it would bother Tell a lot if he knew that you were worried about it.”
“I know,” Tina said. “I don’t bring it up to… I don’t know. It’s just… I bought a pair of sunglasses a few weeks back and I used Tell’s credit card to do it, and I just… did it, you know? Didn’t even think about it. And it’s been bothering me ever since. And now this? I don’t want to be a parasite.”
“Are those your words or someone else’s?” Hunter asked. “Because it’s different, if it’s about you or if it’s about how you think other people are seeing you.”
She lay her head down on the bed, just relaxing under the oncoming weight of the sun, rather than fighting it.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Everything is stupid right now and I don’t know what’s me and what’s vampire me and what’s neither of those, and then there’s old me and what old me thought about everything, and then there’s everyone else, and I don’t know which thoughts belong to who right now.”
Hunter grinned.
“Well, when you figure it out, let me know if there’s anything we can do to make it better. Because money is a stupid thing for you to be worrying about.”
She nodded, pulling her feet up onto the bed and shifting so that her head was on her pillow.
“Yeah, when I’ve got three distinct groups of people who might want to hurt or kill me at some point in the near future,” she said. Hunter laughed.
“That about sums it up.”
He crawled up the bed, dropping onto his side somewhere off next to her.
“I’m going to go sit up and wait for the moving people, to be sure that if one of them tries to cut off my head, I kill him first.”
Tina nodded, the paralysis setting in.
“Don’t make too big a mess,” she said. “The maids aren’t coming up anywhere near as often with us here all the time, now.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, reaching out to touch the stone where it had come to rest just below her throat, then leaning over her and kissing her forehead.
“I’ll see you tonight,” he said and left.
Tina went out with Tell a few times, hunting Kaija, just for exercise and practice in fights. He was finally not worried about whether or not she was going to survive them, so he let her fight them on her own, when they found them, but their numbers were definitely going down and the places that Tina could come up with to go looking for them were getting less and less likely.
“How many Order cars have you tagged, now?” Tina asked as he got into the car coming back from his nightly chore at Kyle’s apartment.
“Ten,” Tell said. “And by my count, it was twenty different guys inside of them.”
“That’s a lot of grunts to be involved in watching his place,” Tina said. “Really long rotation.”
“It is,” Tell agreed. “Makes me worry that they’ve grown more than I anticipated, and that they’re just picking guys at random from a huge pool of free labor.”
“Yeah,” Tina said. “You know where they are?”
“Yeah,” Tell told her. “There’s a building downtown where they’ve all been to several times since I tagged them. Most of them go every day. I did a street view of it online, and it’s a self-help studio, four stories tall, and it always looks packed.”
“Do you think they’ve got people coming in off the street for, like… guru meditation stretching?” Tina asked.
“You’ve really got this guru thing figured out, don’t you?” Tell asked, and she grinned quickly.
“I never got it. When I got upset or lost focus, it was usually because I needed to reel myself in and figure out what I actually wanted and how to get it. Just not my thing to go… Never mind, I don’t like how I sound saying what I actually think.”
“Aren’t you modern?” Tell asked. “I don’t know if it’s getting a lot of foot traffic, but I’m without a doubt that that’s where they’re meeting for their regular work. I wouldn’t guarantee that they’re doing any magic there, and I hope they aren’t stupid enough to kill someone there, but the normal brown-robe with candles and chanting meetings will be in there somewhere.”
“Four stories,” Tina said. “That’s a lot of space.”
“It’s all in how you use it,” Tell said. “Though it’s a huge footprint, too. You could hold four simultaneous high school dances in there, if they don’t have it too divided out with walls.”
Tina had a flash and giggled.
“What’s that?” Tell asked.
“It’s a video game,” she said. “You go through this level and wipe them all out, and then you go up a level and do it again, and then up at the top is the boss level.”
“Is that where the word came from?” Tell asked. “I was not one of the early-early gamers.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “That’s just how they worked, back then.”
He nodded.
“It is. I’m working on pulling the information for the building to see if I find any familiar names, but I think they’ve had a lot of turnover. I recognize people, certainly, but not that many, and they seem to have not moved up as much as I might have expected.”
“A cult as bureaucracy,” Tina said. “How interesting.”
“Or, you know, not that,” Tell said, and she grinned.
“You think they’re all humans?” she asked.
“I think that they’ve all had heartbeats, for the ones I’ve run into,” Tell said. Tina nodded.
“What do you think about me trying to join them?” she asked.
“What?” he demanded. “What? Why would you…? No. You can’t do that. There are literally no women anywhere in the entire organization.”
“So maybe it’s time to shake things up,” Tina said. “You know anything about necromancy that I could use to impress them?”
“No,” Tell said more loudly. “Absolutely not. I mean, no I don’t know anything about bringing back the dead, no I don’t know how to impress them, and no, you are not going to go walking into that building and ask for an application.”
“That obvious?” Tina asked. “I bet I could get through to at least the third floor before someone decided I shouldn’t be there.”
“And then you would have to fight your way all the way back out without having accomplished anything,” Tell said. “What… What’s your endgame, here?”
“Recon,” Tina said. “Go in there, figure out how many of them there are, what they’re all doing with their time, how many of them match up to the pictures you have. Like that. You have a better way of getting that information?”
“Long range lens on a camera,” Tell said, and Tina nodded.
“Sounds like
cold work.”
“I’m pretty good at it,” he said. “Just takes patience.”
“Says the one who left a dragon’s toe on a woman’s gym bag in order to make her show him where she was doing her secret meetings. You are not made of patience, my friend.”
He grinned back and nodded.
“You’re not wrong. But I have worked around the Order before, and I’m telling you, taking it slow is the right way to do this. It may take a year or more before we’re ready to do a surgical strike of some kind, and everything could change between now and then.”
“Colette asked you to protect her brother from a world that he wasn’t equipped to handle,” Tina said. “Is that what this looks like, to you?”
“Oh, that’s just not nice,” Tell said. “Twist that knife, won’t you? I know that I’m slow-walking something that sounded an awful lot like an emergency, but… I think even Colette would understand, after what she went through.”
“How about I talk to her brother?” Tina asked. “Meet him at work, ask him to go for a drink, like that. See if I can feel out what he’s doing for entertainment these days.”
“You think he’s going to tell you about his secret death-worshipping society on a first date?” Tell rebutted.
“Give me something,” Tina said. “I mean, come on. We have to do something.”
“You’re sick of being stuck in the apartment with Hunter,” Tell said, and she shook her head.
“No, I seriously am, you’re right, but not like you think. I love spending the nights with him. We talk and we laugh and we do stuff that’s a lot of fun. I hate him being stuck there with me while I’m working.”
“Ah,” Tell said. “No, I can see that being miserable. He’s not the type to stay in one place for long and be happy about it. Regardless, I’m going to go take some surveillance shots of their place tonight and set up a good camera to watch it during the day. I don’t think there’s anything for you to do, staying out with me. I do need another list of places to look for Kaija, though, and we both know you’re still sneaking back to your old information to try to figure out how my blood relates to a cure.”
Tina nodded.
“He doesn’t like that, either.”
Tell shrugged.
“So tell him to go sit on a tack,” he said. “He’s got his nice setup for conferences, and I have access to the wireless history; he’s got people on there all night long trying to get his attention. Disappearing for several days without warning can’t have done well for his business reputation.”
“Which he cares about more than his personal relationships,” Tina said. “So you’re seriously going to ask me to hop out at Viella and go up and do it all again, while you get to go off and do the real work?”
“Research is never not real work,” Tell said. “You know that. I sent you the background I got on Kyle. You want to spend another few hours going through that?”
Tina nodded.
Anyone who Colette might have stayed in touch with who was close enough to notice that Kyle was spiraling out of control. The list would include barbers and restaurant workers, if he had regulars that went back that far, and Tina would start digging into each of them as she sorted the list by priority.
She was good at this.
Tell said so often.
It was just that Hunter was going to come sit next to her, ostensibly to discuss what she was working on out of a genuine sense of interest, and then he would talk about something else, and then it would have been an hour and she wouldn’t have gotten a thing done.
“You can’t just go to the office,” Tell said after a minute. “He’ll know you went to avoid him.”
“I know,” she said. “I know. It’s just… It’s really hard. Everything is supposed to be new and exciting and adventurous, and instead he’s bored out of his mind and I’m trying to entertain him instead of getting work done. You have any new thoughts on how to appease Sophie?”
“No,” he admitted. “Everything I can think of is either pointless or just going to make things worse.”
“You think that maybe you could take a few days off as a human and just hang out with him while I do some testing?” Tina asked.
“You think you’re ready for that?” Tell asked. “Tell you the truth, the last time was kind of hard. I don’t want to keep doing it over and over again.”
Tina frowned.
“She said that your blood was strong,” she said. “But she didn’t say specifically that the cure was in your blood, did she?”
Tell shook his head.
“No, that would be entirely too specific for Ella,” Tell said, and Tina nodded.
“All right. If you’re only going to do it once, I’d rather use a whole bunch of different equipment to try to document everything about you, in case there’s something I need to check later.”
“You can use the room off of the kitchen if you want,” Tell said. “Used to be I had enough fountains through during the day that they liked to work out in there, but it’s wasted space, just now.”
Tina nodded.
“All right. I’ll put together a list of things I want to try and make sure I have all of the equipment for all of it; I’ll want to do before-and-after on everything, so I can at least figure out whether I know how the stuff works before I use it on you as a human.”
“Mmm,” Tell said, pulling into the garage under Viella. “I also object to dying as a part of this, so anything you think of that involves surgical removal? Scratch it off your list.”
Tina nodded.
“You got it.”
He rolled his jaw to the side and shook his head.
“Over there,” he said.
Tina turned to look where he was watching and found a young man sitting on a motorcycle, talking on a cell phone.
She closed her eyes, focusing to hear what he was saying.
“He isn’t talking on that phone,” she said quietly after a moment.
“Nope,” Tell said. “Solid prop, though. Convincing to look at. You mind letting Vince know on your way up?”
“Yeah, I can do that,” Tina said. “Or I could just go over and wail him against the wall a few times.”
“There is nothing meek about you,” Tell said. “He doesn’t belong here, and security can take care of him without escalating. Right now, that’s all we’re hoping for.”
Tina nodded and left, going up the stairs to the lobby, where she found Vince dutifully at his desk.
“Do you ever sleep?” she asked him, and he gave her a genuine but formal smile.
“Miss Matthews,” he said. “How are you tonight?”
“Cold,” she said. It would have been a joke, except that Vince would have never laughed at it. “There’s a guy down in the garage who seems a bit out of place,” she went on. “You mind having someone take a look?”
“Security is already on their way, Miss. He just arrived two and a half minutes ago, and I’ve been watching him quite closely to make sure that he does not try to install any form of electronic or other unwanted device while they organize themselves.”
Tina smiled, drawing a deep breath.
“I feel so glad, knowing you’re watching over us,” she said. “Let us know if you need anything.”
Vince gave her a warmer smile.
“You seem to be quite happy, including yourself as available for service,” he said, and she nodded.
“I am. Yeah.”
He knew.
Obviously he knew.
Vince knew everything.
How did he know everything?
And why was he here, serving as a concierge in a rich building, when that kind of skill was clearly capable of fetching a much higher market value elsewhere?
She didn’t understand, but Tell and Hunter were quite fond of telling her that she was never going to figure Vince out.
“Is there anything else I can do for you, Miss?” Vince asked. She shook her head.
“Do you get eno
ugh time off?” she asked. “You’re always here.”
He smiled, the corners of his eyes pinching in real humor and warmth.
“Don’t worry about me and whether I’m getting what I want out of life, Miss Matthews. I don’t like the idea that it bothers you, and I assure you, there’s no reason for anything about my situation to bother you.”
Tina winced her mouth in and up, shaking her head.
“That is not the most reassuring thing you could say,” she told him, and he grinned.
“They’ve escorted your interloper out,” he said. “If you’ll excuse me, I’d like to sweep the garage, myself, once, to be sure that he didn’t leave anything behind.”
Tina raised her eyebrows and he winked at her.
“I’m very good at making it seem like I’m always here,” he said. “It’s about playing the odds of when people are going to be coming or going. I have eight minutes before the next likely resident arrival, so I must be quick.”
“Don’t let me keep you from it,” Tina said, walking alongside him toward the stairs and the elevator.
“Have a good night, Miss,” Vince said as he split away.
“You, too,” she answered.
She got onto the elevator and pushed the button for the penthouse, scanning her keycard and then going to lean against the back of the elevator, going through the list of things she was planning on getting done tonight, and wincing at the thought of how needy Hunter was going to be, after being cramped up in the apartment on his own all night.
Again.
The elevator doors opened and she blinked, peering into the apartment and listening hard.
The lights were off.
No heartbeats, either, on this floor or above, so if someone was still here, they were undead.
She pushed the button for the elevator to wait, taking her knife out of her boot and standing.
That was when she saw the dress.
Visible from the elevator, there was a small coat closet, and there was a royal purple dress hanging from the back of the door, there, with a note pinned to it.
Tina got off the elevator, finding that she had overlooked the distinctive light from the trail of candles that went up the stairs.
