“Could you please turn on the television?” Alcander’s voice was soft and submissive, a gentle inquiry.
Jasper glanced at him still poised on the edge of the bed like he might bolt at a moment’s notice, and then looked at the nightstand between the two beds, at the remote that sat in plain sight.
“Uh, sure, go ahead.” Jasper nodded to the remote.
Alcander looked very uncomfortable, wiping his hands on the knees of his pants.
“What is it?”
“A remote control is amongst the dirtiest things in the home. In a hotel it’s dirtier than the bedsheets, the floor, and even the toilet. On average they are covered with more than 1.2 million CFU per square inch. It’s disgusting.”
Jasper wasn’t sure what CFU meant, but he was sure he was missing something. Was the vampire worried about germs? There were some demon diseases, but they were extremely uncommon and not transferable via hotel TV remote. “You’re a vampire,” Jasper explained.
“Yes, I am aware of that.”
The two of them stared at each other until Jasper finally relented. “Whatever.” Rolling his eyes, he picked up the remote. “What do you want to watch?”
“The local news, please.”
Jasper found the channel and leaned back against the wooden headboard, watching the screen. Maybe it would distract him from his thoughts or, even better, maybe it would be so mind-numbingly boring he’d just fall asleep. There was a story about a fire that almost burned down a beloved bakery, the dark-haired newswoman getting misty-eyed over burnt pastries, followed by a short report on gunfire and possible gang activity in the park a few blocks away from the hotel. The news had moved on to a story about a new subway entrance on the west side, but Jasper spoke anyway.
“That was Crimson,” he said. “The gunfire. And me too, I guess.”
“Why?” Alcander turned to him, alarmed. “Did Ivory find us again?”
The Hunter shook his head. “No, it wasn’t her. It was… someone else. Someone I know. Knew.”
“A demon?”
“No,” Jasper said quickly. “Well… he didn’t used to be, anyway. He’s something else now.” He ran his hand over his face, scrubbing his jaw, rubbing the back of his neck.
The vampire’s posture changed. He pulled his feet up onto the bed and crossed his legs underneath them, turning his front more towards Jasper as he straightened his spine so that he looked a little taller, a little surer. His hands still rested on his knees, but they no longer moved anxiously. He was looking at Jasper indirectly, from the corner of his light eyes. Jasper frowned and glanced away.
“Who was it?” Alcander asked in that gentle voice of his. Against the soft rhythm of the shower, it was almost like music.
“Adam,” Jasper whispered with a shiver. He pulled the sleeves of his jacket down over his hands. “Adam Mallory. He was my friend, my partner. Years ago, in Seattle. We knew each other since we were just kids, went to school together.” The aforementioned school was the Hunting Academy, Adrian of Nicomedia Academy, in Seattle. He and Adam were top of their class, and when they both graduated early, it just made sense that they should stay together. Jasper laughed once, abruptly, the sound like choking. He looked back at Alcander still sitting on the opposite bed with his hands resting on his knees, and looked away again.
“It was my fault. How he died. It was my idea.”
“Your fault and your idea are entirely different things.”
“It feels like the same thing.” Jasper’s throat felt tight. His eyes felt hot. “I convinced him to take on a job. It was too big for us.” But what had actually happened was that they had decided to go after a mark that hadn’t been assigned to them—a powerful, unnamed creature, otherworldly in its design, elusive in its behavior. It left no scent and showed no aura, but Jasper had been able to feel the thing a mile off, and he was certain he and Adam would prevail where others had failed. “We were stupid. Stupid kids.”
Alcander said nothing.
“I thought he was dead. I was sure of it.” He remembered Adam’s shaking body and how quickly it went still. He wished he could forget. “And I moved away from there, to move past all that, or whatever. The trauma—” if words could have eye rolls, that one would be spinning in its socket “—of it all. And then somehow he finds me? But he’s not Adam anymore, he’s some—he’s some thing.”
Alcander was quiet. “I’m sorry you feel that way,” he said eventually. He seemed on the brink of saying something else, but the shower shut off in the other room, and he shut his mouth, returning his attention to the screen.
Jasper wiped his hand over his eyes, sniffing back the tears that managed to escape. If Crimson saw, he knew he’d never hear the end of it. Luckily when Crimson came out of the bathroom, he didn’t seem to be paying much attention to either of them. Wearing just jeans and still preening his damp hair, he went and dug through the closet in search of a shirt, pausing only long enough to tell Alcander to “turn that boring shit off.”
Jasper turned it down a few notches but didn’t change the channel. “Well, what do you want to watch?”
Crimson grinned. “What’s on the pay-per-view?”
Jasper scowled, but his heart wasn’t in it. “Don’t be gross.”
There were only two beds, but a wordless glance from Crimson sent Alcander back to the couch. The werespider tossed a pillow at him, and he caught it with a demon’s ease, though truthfully Jasper found it hard to think of him as a demon. He was scared of remote controls, for Christ’s sake. Crimson pulled a black T-shirt over his bare torso and fell back on the bed where Alcander had been. He reached to the nightstand and switched the light off.
“Sleep tight, hybrid—”
“Jasper.”
“—we’re leaving tomorrow.”
“What?” Jasper turned the light back on. “What do you mean, leaving?”
“It’s getting awful hot around here, what with my family and your friends. I’m thinkin’ we should get the fuck outta Dodge.”
“And go… where? Like, Jersey or something?”
“Or something,” agreed Crimson, turning the light off once more. It might have been a trick of the light from the television, but his eyes shone red in the dark. Jasper was sure he’d never get used to that. “I want to leave early, so get some sleep.”
“Whatever.” Despite the warning in his chest, Jasper turned his back to the werespider and closed his eyes.
#
“Alright, Doc,” said Crimson, an hour after Jasper had gone to sleep. He and Alcander were seated in a booth at the in-house bar, far to the back of the dining area. Crimson’s shining eyes assured that they could get whatever table they wanted, and that any mortals in the area would keep from pestering them. “Talk to me. Whatcha find out?”
Alcander was very uncomfortable in public. Too many people, too many contaminants, too many variables. The corner of his paper placemat was wrinkled, and he tried to smooth the crease. This little task seemed to take up the entirety of his focus. “You talked to him, didn’t you?”
Crimson slipped the placemat out from underneath his fingers and swapped it for his own. “Sure, I talk to the hybrid all the time.”
“Not him.” Alcander found other imaginary problems on the table. Packets of sugar that needed to be rearranged in their holders by color, a listing of the daily specials that needed to be straightened on its menu stand. He’d wash his hands raw after this. “His friend. Adam.”
“Oh,” said Crimson. “Him.”
“Why do you say it like that?” asked Alcander.
Crimson frowned. “You’re not gonna like it.” Alcander gave him a look, and Crimson sighed, pushed himself into the corner of the booth with his back against the wall, and kicked his feet up in the empty space beside him. “I scared the shit outta him before I knew he was important, so he didn’t really wanna tell me much. Way he tells it, though, our little lost lamb upstairs is actually more of a wolf in sheep’s clothes. He said
they used to be hunting buddies.”
Alcander’s brow creased. “That’s nonsense. Places like St. James do not hire nonhumans.”
“You know, Al, that’s just what I said,” replied Crimson. “I said, ‘Bullshit,’ and he goes on to tell me this crazy story about how he and Jasper chased down this… frankly made-up-sounding demon. And how it killed him. And how the agency buried him.”
“If he had been buried by a bunch of Hunters, they would have put him down as soon as he woke up.”
Crimson scratched the side of his throat, ruminating. “Well, it’s a little vague. I don’t think they knew he was comin’ back. Way he told it, he was in the ground for a while.”
“More than a night?” asked Alcander.
“Try more than a week,” replied Crimson. “I think they embalmed him, Al. He reeks. You ever smelled formaldehyde after it’s been marinating in a corpse for a month or two? I probably did him a favor, putting so many holes in him.” There was something he wasn’t saying, but if he didn’t say it now, Alcander knew there was no reason to bother with trying to push him. Once the werespider dug his heels in, he couldn’t be moved, not with a stick nor a carrot. “I dunno, man,” continued Crimson. “The kid does have a sore spot when it comes to the whole demon thing, and he acts sketchy as hell any time we’re on the wrong side of the mortal law. It’s pretty weird for a freelance mercenary…”
“You said that demon did not like him,” said Alcander. He saw the conclusion Crimson was working himself around to, and Crimson was right; he didn’t like it, mainly because he knew Crimson’s preferred way of dealing with Hunters who crossed him. It was much the same way he dealt with anyone who crossed him, which was to say that, if Crimson had his way, he’d shoot Jasper dead while he slept, and never think of him again.
Alcander took issue with this, not only because the half-blood had saved his life, but also because he simply couldn’t believe Jasper could be a Hunter. Hunters were almost as single-minded as religious zealots and even more self-righteous. Crueler. “Perhaps he fabricated the story in hopes of vengeance,” offered Alcander. “Though I fear to say that what Adam told you bears a… striking resemblance to what Jasper told me.”
Crimson raised an eyebrow. “Which was?”
“That they worked together. Took a mission too big. Adam was killed.” Alcander ran out of things to fuss over on the table and started picking at his cuticles instead. “He seemed to believe… he was no longer Adam.” It was a common enough misconception among humans, that a demon reborn was purged entirely of his human nature.
“See, that seems pretty Hunter-y to me,” said Crimson. Alcander opened his mouth to protest (he did not want to sit quietly in this restaurant while Crimson strolled upstairs and put half a dozen bullets in the half-blood’s sleeping body), but the werespider held up a hand. “But you know what doesn’t seem Hunter-y? He let him go. I was going to kill him, and Jasper stopped me.”
“And to you that means…?”
“I dunno,” repeated Crimson. “Did you find out anything with that… contraption of yours?”
The “contraption” in question was his computer, which was still back home in the warehouse. He hadn’t had the opportunity to grab it when the other werespiders dragged him out of the building, but he had done a fair amount of research on the half-blood prior, first at Crimson’s request and then, as his prying returned more questions than answers, to satiate his own curiosity.
“St. James has no files on him,” said Alcander. “According to what little I could find elsewhere, he attended a human high school in Seattle. Graduated two years early. Both parents deceased.”
“Could they fake that?” asked Crimson.
Alcander shrugged. “It would be difficult, but St. James is a very powerful organization.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” said Crimson. “Maybe we should get rid of him, just to be safe.”
Alcander leaned slightly across the table, lowering his voice to just above a whisper. “If you lay a hand on that human without proof, I am never going to speak to you again.”
Crimson looked more amused by this threat than anything, a big grin lighting up his features, reaching all the way to his brown eyes. “Whoa, Doc, check you out. There’s a little vamp in you after all.”
“I am serious, Crimson.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Crimson was still grinning. “Don’t get your fangs all in a twist. I like the little brat too, alright?” Alcander wasn’t surprised that this was true, but he was surprised to hear Crimson vocalize it. “Here’s what we’ll do. The Summer Solstice Tour is in the next few days, down in Florida. The three of us will take a nice little vacation, far, far, far away from St. James, and we’ll see how he reacts. And I’ll, uh… try to push his buttons a little along the way, see if I can figure anything out. Hell, maybe if we’re lucky, someone in the Summerlands will have a clue about what he is.”
“What if he is a Hunter, though?” asked Alcander, his voice very soft.
Crimson shrugged. “His friends are gonna have a helluva time finding his body all the way in the Summerlands.”
#
Jasper had been checking in with Charlie regularly. Since the werespider had super hearing and they were rarely separated, it was mostly through coded texts. So far, he hadn’t had much to report other than the fact Crimson hadn’t killed him yet. When he and the vampire snuck out in the middle of the night, Jasper decided to give his father a call.
Charlie sounded tired when he answered the phone, which made sense since it was three thirty in the morning. “Hey, Jazz,” he said, “you okay?”
Jasper was struck with a sudden and intense pang of homesickness. “Yeah, I’m okay.”
“You sound strange.”
“Just tired.” He knew he should tell Charlie about Adam, but he also knew what would happen if the Hunters found out about his ex-partner. Even though he knew it wasn’t really Adam anymore, even though he knew he’d probably hurt people, even though it was his job to stop things like him, he didn’t want Adam to be hunted down and killed, didn’t want his death on his conscience once again. “I think the spider wants to leave town.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Uh, well, he told me so. Says it’s getting too dangerous between the Hunters and his family. Have you guys found them yet?”
“They’re very evasive. We’ve got a good team, though. McKracken, Thurman, the Neilson brothers. We’re hopeful. Are you going to go with him?”
“I should, right? I mean, if he’s running scared, he’s probably going to somewhere or someone he trusts, right? Could be an actual lead.”
“Where are you going?”
“Uh, I’m not sure. He hasn’t told me yet. Maybe he hasn’t even decided. The guy’s hard to gauge sometimes.”
“You’ll let me know when he does, right?”
“Right.” There was a lull in the conversation, and Jasper thought he heard something in the hallway outside the room. It could have been anything. Another guest. Room service. “I should go; they could be back any minute. I’ll text you.”
“Are you sure you’re alright?”
Jasper almost started to tell him about Adam but stopped himself. Whatever happened to him wouldn’t be his fault again. “I’m fine. It’s just… hard, being on edge all the time. And I don’t have much to show for it.”
“You’re doing great,” Charlie assured him. “It’ll be worth it, I just know it. Just keep it up. He trusts you enough to take you with him, that’s amazing. I’m sure he’ll open up even more. You’ve got this, Jasper.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
“I’ll let you go. I love you. And let me know where you’re going.”
#
“Florida,” said Alcander.
The two demons got back late, but where they went or what they discussed, Jasper did not know. He lay in his feigned sleep with the gun clutched under the pillow, waiting for one of them to make a move. Crimson went back to the
bed and Alcander back to the couch, and from there, as far as he could tell, they both went to sleep.
Crimson was still asleep now. Jasper heard Alcander trying to wake him first, but Crimson only responded with rumbling growls before dramatically cocooning himself in the comforter and stuffing his head underneath the pillow. So much for his so-called “early start.”
Jasper felt like doing much the same thing, but Crimson was so mean about it that he felt a little bad for Alcander. He resigned himself to getting up without a fight. “Crimson thinks it’s our best bet, since his cousins won’t expect him to flee south,” continued Alcander as he started remaking the bed that Jasper had just vacated. Something about just letting the vampire pick up after him didn’t sit well with Jasper. He grabbed the opposite corner to help.
“Yeah, but Florida though? It seems kind of like a dramatic reaction to me. I mean, is it really necessary to—”
“What does it matter if it’s necessary?” mumbled Crimson from underneath the pillow. He lifted the edge, peering out with his shining eyes, a small frown on the corner of his mouth. “You’ve got no friends here and you don’t own any property. What’s it matter where you are?” There was a trap in these words, and Jasper decided to take a detour around it.
“It doesn’t. It just seems far. I’ve never been to Florida.”
“All the better reason to go.” Crimson yawned. He tossed the pillow aside and sat up. Jasper hated the neat way his hair lay in smooth, silky waves even right when he woke up. “You don’t have to go, but if you decide to stay behind, you’d better keep your mouth shut.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t want to go,” Jasper said. “I just don’t understand why there. Do you, like, have a place to stay there?”
“Nope. But it’s the furthest south I can go without leaving the country. I guess if you prefer Mexico…”
Jasper felt a twist of sheer panic at the idea of being that far removed from the influence of the agency and shook his head. “Florida’s fine. Are you worried we’ll be followed?”
Strangers in the Night Page 11
