Sketched

by David Alan Jones

  “I don’t believe any of this,” Matt said. “You’re making excuses for your crimes, trying to blame them on everyone but yourself. No one’s making fear factories in their poolhouses and basements. Only a handful of people even know how to steal courage from their votaries.”

  Kraft chuckled. “You had a campaign fundraising dinner in DC a couple of weeks ago, the night you had to bail out Piper Ross when she bit off more than she could swallow attacking Felix Maer. I guarantee you, every American succubus at that rally either owns a fear factory outright or else borrows from friends. What you’re saying might have been true five hundred years ago, but today nearly every succubus family of any worth has one, and they’re using them liberally.”

  Rose eyed the vampire standing by the door. Rubio hadn’t twitched a muscle or even batted an eyelash since arriving. “What’s in all this for you? Wasn’t it Kraft who sent the Army to attack your people in Mexico?”

  “That was then,” Rubio said with all the lip movement of a master ventriloquist. “Now we have a deal.”

  “What deal?”

  “I help Kraft, I get Piper.”

  “Hell no.” Rose spun to face the vampire, instantly drawing speed, strength, and healing.

  “Calm yourself, Ms. Carver.” Kraft sounded like a school principal dressing down a kid in his charge. “I understand your feelings. You’ve made a pact with the so-called Vampire Queen, but I wonder if she would be as quick to defend you if your roles were reversed.”

  “Of course, she would.”

  “Seems unlikely to me since she’s done nothing but lie since the day you swore allegiance to one another.”

  “What would you know about it, hidden away here in your mansion? You’re a liar.”

  “Where was Piper the night Alice and your sister paid you a visit?”

  Rose swallowed. “We discussed it. She was indisposed.”

  “And you accepted that answer.”

  “We’re friends,” Matt said. “That’s what you do when friends tell you something; you believe them.”

  “Then perhaps it’s time you reconsidered her side of that friendship.” Kraft clearly savored the words flowing between his glossy white teeth. “Piper knew you called for her. She ignored that call because she has a peace treaty with a vampire named Vincent Stillman. Your parents’ former home, the one you so quickly moved them from after Alice’s visit, happens to lie within Stillman’s territory. Rather than break her treaty with Stillman, one she entered into less than a week before the incident in question, she broke yours.”

  The room fell silent. Rose didn’t want to believe Piper would place her treaty with a fellow vampire ahead of the one she had made with the Order, but deep inside, she accepted the possibility. That could explain Grace’s and Olivia’s reactions at the con when Piper swore she hadn’t gotten Rose’s calls for help.

  Worse, discernment told Rose that, true or not, Kraft believed what he was saying. He wasn’t lying, though she held out hope Kraft’s informant was mistaken.

  “Even if all that’s true, what do you want from us?” Rose asked.

  “Simple. Remedy the mistake you’ve made in allying yourself with a pariah like Piper Ross and throw your lot in with me.”

  Matt reared back as if his father had slapped him. “Why would we ever do that?”

  “Because, in the long run, we want mostly the same things. Right now, you want your girl, Torres, in Congress to speak for the slinkers. I want someone there to help me save Society from an outside takeover. You don’t have a chance in hell of getting her elected, and even if she somehow wins a seat, she’ll have no voice. Let me backchannel for her, and I guarantee she’ll not only win the seat, but she’ll also win the nation.”

  “And throw our alliance with Piper in the garbage?” Rose demanded. “I’ll admit she let us down before, and maybe she does have a pact with this Stillman you mentioned, but that doesn’t change the fact that she aided us when we needed her in the past.”

  “We know something about loyalty and how to maintain it.” Matt started to turn away, but his father’s next words froze him in his tracks.

  “What if Piper killed Barbara Griffith?”

  “You’ll say anything to break our alliance, won’t you?” Matt asked. “You disgust me.”

  “Facts are facts. They don’t care about your disgust or your loyalty.” Kraft folded his arms, his eyes riveted on his son. “Who has more to gain than Piper by fomenting chaos in Washington?”

  “Alice McAleese,” Rose said without hesitation. “She’s the one trying to overthrow Society.”

  “Yes, by wooing its top members, not killing them. Why sabotage all the goodwill she’s earned by assassinating the very woman who could have given her what she desires most, legitimacy and a voice at the seat of power? Piper, on the other hand, has a world of freedom to gain by shattering Society. She’s already devastated her most powerful vampiric enemies. What’s her next logical target besides Society?”

  Rose shook her head emphatically. “She wouldn’t do that. As you say, she isn’t killing succubi; she’s fighting a war against her own kind.”

  Kraft’s smile could have turned back global warming as he sat forward, hands on his desk. “But Rose, dear, don’t you realize? We are her kind.”

  9

  Rhapsody

  It was past 2 a.m. before Torres’s rally broke up and Rose could assemble the thirty team members they had brought to run it. Tanner’s security team swept the convention center three times to ensure none of Jason Kraft’s people remained. Even then, he went around barking orders, scolding himself and his team for their failure to detect the vampires earlier in the day. It had gotten so bad, Rose and Matt had been forced to have a quiet word with Tanner. Few succubi in the world could have seen through the charm screen spun by Kraft’s infiltrators. It wasn’t his or his sentries’ faults they had been taken unawares.

  With everyone crowded near the stage, Rose and Matt recounted their meeting with Kraft. They glossed over Kraft’s accusations against Piper, how she had possibly been the one who executed Barbara Griffith. The gathered succubi had murmured about Kraft’s offer to help Torres win her seat, but Olivia appeared hung up on a different part of the tale.

  “Rubio?” Olivia’s brows shot up. “We’re talking the old school, Mexican cartel vampire Rubio? Clemente’s son?”

  “That’s the one.” Matt leaned back against the stage, elbows up, next to Rose. “Seriously, the last person I ever expected to see cozying up to my father. I hadn’t seen him since he was holed up in that basement in Mexico surrounded by American soldiers.”

  “And all that thanks to Kraft,” Rose said.

  It was common knowledge in succubus circles, even outside the Beltway, that Kraft orchestrated America’s invasion of Mexico, which had soured the US’s reputation internationally. Worse, it failed to stop either the drug trade or illegal immigration across the southern border. The unsuspecting human public blamed Kraft as well, but only as a minor player following former President Judy Hershel-Smith's orders. The all too human Hershel-Smith had suffered full impeachment by the House and removal from office for high crimes by the Senate, while Kraft disappeared underground and evaded justice.

  “Mother had some clashes with Clemente and Rubio about twenty years ago when they tried opening a corridor for drugs into our territory.” Olivia draped an arm over the folding chair next to her in an unconsciously languid repose that drew quite a bit of male attention from the incubi in the auditorium and somehow complimented her light southern drawl. “They were tough, not just because they knew how to fight, but they had numbers. Most of my kind are loners. The few who know how to organize—”

  “Like your mother,” Matt quipped.

  Olivia smiled, showing her human teeth. “Like my mother, they’re the ones who gain power. Clemente wasn’t all that old, maybe two hundred, I guess, but he had amassed a following that caught attention from the ancient vampires down in South Americ
a. He remained loyal and did their bidding whenever they called on him, so they let him live. In fact, some of them trusted him with their business matters. I guess he taught Rubio everything he knew.”

  “And now Rubio works for Kraft.” Tanner sounded bitter. “I guess strange bedfellows and all that, but it’s damned scary if you ask me.”

  Several people nodded or spoke their agreement.

  “What chance is there you’ll make a deal with him?” Olivia asked the question without a hint of emotion, but Rose knew her well enough after all these months to recognize the vampire’s anxiety.

  “Zero,” Matt said.

  “Not zero.” Rose glanced at his incredulous expression before turning back to the equally astonished crowd. “We’re not in the best of positions right now. We’ve pinned our hopes on this campaign, and you all know it’s not going so well.”

  Torres nodded slowly. “She’s right. We can get people excited, assuming they show up to these rallies, but only by charming them, and that wears off within hours. Polling shows I’ve got less than ten percent of the vote in the state, and that’s mostly in the east. Atlanta numbers are far worse. Georgians don’t want a transplanted Texan female Democrat representing them in Washington.”

  “It’s early days yet.” Myra Hanks turned in her seat to face Torres. “You’re the underdog trying to unseat an incumbent. That kind of thing takes time.”

  “Too much time. We’ve only got six months left.”

  Alfred David Saxby, the incumbent senator Torres aimed to unseat, was a clueless human easily, and often, manipulated by his succubus peers. More than once, at cocktail parties and fundraisers, Washington elites had intimated they had no inclination and certainly no intention of exchanging him for a slinker like Torres. His malleability made him too valuable.

  Matt stood up from his slouch, his eyes intense, flitting from Torres to Rose and back again. “You two are seriously talking about siding with my father, the man who set up the fear factory? The man who imprisoned and tortured innocent people, including your own family, Rose? This is insanity.”

  “This is politics.” Torres looked no more pleased by the prospect than Rose felt. “You do what you must to get your foot in the door. Reform doesn’t happen if no one ever knows you’re there.”

  “I’m not saying I want to join him necessarily.” Rose let her gaze travel from face to face in the crowd as she spoke until she reached Matt. “But I’m not going to shut the door on the idea. At some point, we have to admit we’re fumbling around in the dark when it comes to succubus politics.”

  “And real politics.” Torres’s otherwise exquisite features sagged into a glum expression, like a businesswoman at the end of a harrowing day realizing she has accomplished nothing.

  “Our people need a win.”

  “At any price?” Matt stared at Rose as if he had never met her.

  “No, but at some price.” Rose could feel the crowd’s eyes on her, on them. She and Matt rarely argued; they were too busy managing the campaign and a growing enterprise that required all their time and energy. Several in the room, Tanner Watts in particular, became visibly uncomfortable. Rose understood their discomfort, but better that than keeping secrets from them. Though she and Matt couldn’t afford to share every detail of how the Order functioned, they had agreed at the beginning to disseminate what they could. After a year spent hunting down the fear factory, she had come to despise secrets, especially the institutional sort.

  Matt turned his attention to Olivia. “What about Piper? How do you think she’ll react to the news if we ally ourselves with Rubio? How’s that going to look to her?”

  “She won’t like it one bit,” Olivia said. “But Mother’s practical, she’ll be willing to listen if we explain the need, and I think she’ll come around. She knows this election is important for us all.”

  Matt lifted his eyebrows at Rose. She took his meaning without a moment’s reflection. We should tell Olivia everything, don’t you think? Matt didn’t possess mental telepathy. That wasn’t a thing amongst succubus kind so far as Rose knew. But she heard the question in her head all the same.

  “Olivia,” Rose said, steeling herself for what she was about to say. “Kraft told us something more—something we need to discuss.” Rose’s insides felt like jelly. Though Olivia’s time with the Order had begun as a hostage exchange, she and Rose had grown close over the last several months. Rose treasured Olivia’s friendship, but she hadn’t realized how much until this moment when her next words might well destroy it.

  Olivia’s beautiful features took on an inquisitive expression. “Say it. I’m a big girl.”

  “Kraft told us Barbara Griffith is dead and that he thinks your mother did it.”

  The crowd erupted in chatter, people talking over one another to lament the death and debate its cause. Matt lifted his hands for quiet, and they settled, though some continued whispered conversations in the back.

  “No.” Olivia scrunched her pretty nose and shook her head. “Mother wouldn’t play you false like that. Not to mention, we’ve got a vested interest in stabilizing Society, so you can join it. Killing Barbara makes no sense.”

  “Unless she thought she could get away with it, and that Barbara's death would open a way for us to get ahead.” Matt frowned as he spoke, but there was a measure of certitude in his voice. “She might have thought she was doing us a favor.”

  “Liv,” Rose met Olivia’s gaze. “Is there any chance you knew about this?”

  Day-to-day, or more correctly, night-to-night, Olivia presented a human face to the world and, more importantly perhaps, her succubus captors: the gorgeous, demure, and somehow shy visage of a woman in her mid-twenties, fully matured into the ripe beauty of womanhood. Not once in Rose’s presence had she let slip the vampire beneath that outer facade.

  Until now.

  All color drained instantly from Olivia’s face so her already pale skin blanched to a near iridescent white found nowhere in nature. Her green eyes shone like polished jade, whether from some preternatural cause or by simple contrast to her pallid skin, Rose had no idea. A vein high and to the right side of her forehead pulsed with the rapid beating of her heart as the double set of sharpened fangs, otherwise hidden beneath her gums, slid partially from their fleshy sheaths.

  Almost as quickly as Olivia’s face had changed, it returned to normal. Almost normal. Her sharpened teeth receded, her eyes dulled back to their natural green, and the veins in her face submerged like ships succumbing to the ocean’s embrace. Only her color remained off. Some of the natural pigment flowed back into her cheeks, nose, and hairline, but not all. She remained far paler than she had been.

  It all happened so quickly, Rose, dumbfounded, failed to react. She drew nothing from her votaries, though her heart sped up, and the tiny hairs at the nape of her neck came to attention. It occurred to her after the moment passed that Olivia might have been preparing to attack. The realization chilled Rose to her core. She didn’t want to believe Olivia capable of harming her. She simply wouldn’t do that. Whatever Rose had witnessed a moment before, it had been involuntary—a vampire’s autonomic reaction to a mental blow, no more in Olivia’s control than was the exchange of oxygen in her lungs.

  Was it, though? A niggling worry deep in Rose’s brain, one she fought hard to bury, kept whispering at her. She felt sure the news of Barbara's death and Kraft’s accusation came as a shock to Olivia. Drawing discernment nearly confirmed that to Rose. But discernment hinted at something more. She got the feeling Olivia believed Piper not just capable of executing a high-level leader within Society but perhaps even disposed to it. It wasn’t like Piper kept Olivia abreast of her plans. Who knew what sorts of machinations her mother busied herself with these days? Olivia’s doubt about her vampiric mother might have amounted to nothing more than a fleeting concern, but fleeting or not, it was there.

  “Mother told me nothing,” Olivia said, enunciating each word with care. She leaned forward, her expr
ession going suddenly soft, her eyes sparkling with unexpected tears. “I wouldn’t do that to you, Rose. I would think you knew that by now.”

  Rose’s discernment confirmed Olivia’s sincerity. Whatever Piper might have done, she hadn’t shared it with her daughter.

  “I believe you, and I’m sorry, I had to ask the question.” Rose held her friend’s gaze, hoping she still had that friend.

  At length, Olivia sat back, sniffed, and wiped at her eyes. “I understand. Really, I do. I just don’t want you to think so little of me.”

  “It won’t happen again.”

  Olivia fished a tissue from the clutch at her feet and used it to dab at her eyes. It came away pink with her tears. “See that it doesn’t, you brat. You made me cry.”

  “I’m sorry,” Rose said and let a smile touch her lips. “But since I’ve got you emotionally vulnerable, I might as well ask a favor.”

  “What favor?” Olivia looked wary.

  “Can you set up a meeting with Piper? I think we should clear the air—no reason to hesitate.”

  Watching Rose closely, Olivia nodded. “I’ll do my best. She’s been too busy to return my calls lately, but I think she’ll answer if I make her understand it’s urgent.”

  “It is.”

  10

  Outside Looking In

  Rose and Matt huddled around a cheap, three-legged hotel table where she placed her phone on speaker mode. The time on the screen read 10:10 p.m.

  Matt looked exhausted. They had been apart most of the day, separated by the demands of running three campaign rallies in three different cities around Atlanta. Rose had seen him once or twice during the frenzy of each meeting, and again when they road-tripped from site to site, but she hadn’t noticed his gaunt coloring or the deep circles under his eyes until now—badges of fatigue they shared in common. The work was running them ragged.