Bloodless (Henri Dunn Book 2)

by Tori Centanni

  Just for kicks, I walked up the stairs, but doors I’d never really noticed on the landing of the third floor had been closed and were locked, so I couldn’t get down the hall. It seemed the vampires really were away and wanted to make sure the mortals stayed out of their shit. I guessed most of the humans were lodging on the second floor, which was why it was still open. I rattled the doors a few times. Nothing happened.

  If Fiona was lurking around here, she wasn’t coming out of hiding. I’d have to contact Lark and let her know that she was the one who’d left the bodies out in the open. She could deal with Fiona, but I needed her to do it before Fiona killed me.

  I thought of leaving a note, but accusing a vampire of leaving bodies around for mortals to find was the sort of thing better done in person. It was a serious accusation and one that would carry huge, possibly fatal, consequences.

  Fiona had to have known that. Which meant either her hatred of me and desire to torment me had overpowered her sense of self-preservation or she’d been damn sure she wasn’t going to get caught. At least not while leaving me alive.

  Which made it all the scarier that she’d walked away tonight when she could have broken my neck.

  I called Lark’s phone on the way out but she didn’t pick up. I didn’t bother to leave a message. She’d see that I called. That was good enough.

  I made my way home, hastily rushing to get inside the building before something could jump out of the shadows and attack. There was another envelope taped to my door, and I cursed as I yanked it off and brought it inside. It held paperwork to authorize a background check as well as a new lease, with a blank space for Cazimir’s name. There was a Post-it on one that said they’d need a photocopy of his driver’s license as well.

  I tossed it on the counter. Cazimir wasn’t home, so we’d have to work it out later.

  I took a long, hot shower and then went to bed.

  Chapter 15

  It’s amazing what sleep can do for a human body. I woke up in the next afternoon feeling like a whole new person. Still sore, and I had the bruises on my behind to prove it, but I felt refreshed, especially after the painkillers kicked in.

  I put on jeans, a tank top, and boots. I dug the vial of the Cure Sean had given me out of my purse, grateful it was still intact after my purse had been slammed into the pavement along with me, stuffed it into a roll of blue tennis socks I never wore, and shoved them to the back of my dresser. I had no idea what to do with it, so for now, I wanted to keep it secret and safe.

  In the living room, Cazimir was on the sofa, staring at his phone. It was odd even seeing the phone in his hand. He used to have his mortal companions deal with technology for him whenever possible.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked. He glanced over, giving me a look so dark that I felt my stomach clench up. The fact that he was looking a little peaked and hollow-cheeked only added to the sinister effect. “Who died?”

  “You’ll want to see this,” he said grimly, holding up the phone. “Or rather, you will wish you had not seen it. But you should.”

  That was remarkably cryptic, even from the self-proclaimed King of the Damned.

  “What is it?” I asked, but I was already taking the phone from him. He gestured to it. The screen had a video open. It was paused, so I hit the “play” button.

  The video showed a segment of Le Poisson’s parking lot, one I walked through almost every night and would have recognized anywhere. My stomach managed to clench even more tightly. From the vantage point of the camera, the person filming had probably been behind the bushes that lined the walkway to the door. A woman came into the frame, heading toward the restaurant’s entrance. At first, only her black slacks and flats were visible, but the camera zoomed out and there I was. The sun was high in the sky and shone in my blond hair. I wore sunglasses that reflected the light as the sun danced on my skin. I wasn’t tan or anything—being in the sunlight for too long made me itchy—but my skin wasn’t vampire-pale, either.

  I stepped into the middle of the frame and the light in the video adjusted so I was suddenly backlit and the sunlight around me glowed. And then the video faded to black, probably because that’s when I would have turned away from the camera to go inside. Words appeared on the screen: “The Sun Walker Lives.” Below that was a time and date stamp from almost a week ago.

  I played it a second time and then handed the phone back to Cazimir. He was right. I wished I hadn’t seen it, but it was probably better that I had.

  “Where did you find it?” I asked.

  “The Raven Perch.”

  I blew out a breath. The Raven Perch was a locked private internet forum that granted access to vampires, and only vampires. Not their familiars, not their pals. Vampires only, no humans allowed. I had logged on a few times when I was first granted access after meeting its founder in an arcane bar in San Diego, but it was exactly what anyone who’d spent ten minutes around vampires would expect it to be: a bunch of younger immortals posting exaggerated stories of their lives online and having fang-measuring contests. Occasionally, someone chimed in with something useful: a warning about a new vampire hunter or new piece of technology that might make body disposal harder, or tips on the best places to find other immortals in one’s area. Mostly, though, no one trusted it to be as secure as promised.

  I’d stopped logging in after a few visits. I hadn’t even thought of the forum in years and didn’t know it was still around. The internet had changed a lot since then.

  “Who posted it?” I asked, but I had a sneaking suspicion I already knew the answer.

  “Someone called Evelyn5.” Cazimir gave me a meaningful look.

  “Eva,” I said, suspicion confirmed. “What’s the response?”

  Cazimir put his phone back in his pocket. “Most people claiming it’s a hoax or that it’s just a video of a woman and doesn’t prove anything. After all, your face is not particularly recognizable among our kind.”

  That was true. I hadn’t exactly avoided other vampires, but I hadn’t been keen on putting myself in the spotlight, either. I’d met dozens of other immortals over the years who would recognize me easily, but that was hardly a drop in the bucket. There are thousands of vampires spread out all over the world, and only a tiny fraction might have ever seen my face. A video of a human in the sunlight was pretty useless if they had no immortal “before” picture to compare it to.

  I went to the kitchen and pulled out ground coffee and filters.

  “You don’t appear ruffled,” Cazimir observed, his voice tight, almost raw. More quietly, so I almost didn’t hear, he added, “I’d be mortified.”

  I shrugged, even though he was facing away and couldn’t see me. “It’s just a video. Don’t get me wrong, I’m irritated as hell that Eva thought it was okay to film me like that without permission and throw it online. But it’s hardly the worst thing that’s happened to me this week.” I dumped water into the coffeemaker and hit the brew button. “Hell, it doesn’t even make the top ten.”

  I was still going to give Eva one hell of a talking-to about privacy and not posting things about me online next time I saw her.

  Cazimir said nothing. The aroma of coffee filled the apartment.

  “Fiona is the one who’s been leaving the bodies,” I said, watching to see how he reacted. I thought my news was a lot bigger than some shoddy internet video, but Cazimir didn’t really react. He seemed to weigh the words for a very long time, and if he came to any conclusions, he wasn’t sharing.

  I told him what had happened last night, about her leaving the body in my car and then attacking me, before something scared her off. “That’s kind of fucked up, right?” I asked.

  “I think it’s quite obvious why,” Cazimir said flatly.

  I looked at him blankly.

  He rolled his eyes. “Henri, if she didn’t kill you because someone prevented her from doing so, it should be clear that she isn’t the one pulling the strings.”

  My blood ran cold, ice c
rystals forming in my veins. Because if that was true—and Cazimir was right, it had to be; the way she’d looked at me made it plain she’d have preferred to claw my heart out—then stopping Fiona was only half of the equation.

  I tried to regroup, to find the good in this shit storm.

  “Well, at least I can turn Fiona in for leaving evidence around for mortals,” I said. “That will take care of the lackey, and then I just need to find the big boss.”

  “I thought you said their throats were slit,” Cazimir said, glancing briefly over his shoulder to give me a hard look that punctuated his point.

  Uneasiness slithered through my middle as I understood his point: Fiona wasn’t committing the crime of leaving evidence of vampires in the open, not if the corpses lacked bite marks, and I wasn’t sure I’d seen actual teeth imprints in the jagged cuts along the first woman’s throat. Unless she’d left Lilith’s body in the parking lot where I’d dumped it. I’d checked the news and police blotter and hadn’t seen it mentioned, so I assumed she’d taken care of it after I was gone. And even then, she could argue that I’d left the evidence out for mortals, not her.

  “Lark wants her stopped. She practically deputized me to find and arrest the person.”

  Cazimir lifted his shoulders and stood. “I have no doubt Lark will leverage the situation to her advantage.” And with that encouraging tidbit, he disappeared into the bathroom.

  I mulled it over, realizing he was—infuriatingly—right. If the guilty party was someone Lark wanted out of her way, she could easily have them killed under the guise of punishing them for a crime almost no vampire would deny was akin to treason. It would be justified. On the other hand, if the person was someone Lark wanted to protect or keep around, all she had to do was use the fact that the victims had been killed—or seemed to have been killed—with knives, not fangs. And given that Fiona was Lark’s ex-lover’s fledgling, there was a decent chance that was how the pendulum would swing.

  Which meant stopping Fiona was going to be entirely up to me.

  “Well, fuck,” I said. That was exactly why I hadn’t spent a lot of time around vampires, even when I’d been one. There were always politics and manipulation games that I had zero desire to play and little aptitude for winning. I preferred a more straightforward approach, usually involving sarcasm and hitting things.

  I was putting on my coat when Cazimir came out. His hair was damp and his face was clean-shaven. “Where are you going?” he asked, surprised.

  “To see how Lark wants to play it,” I said.

  “Ah,” he said.

  “Hey, by the way, if you don’t have an ID, you’ll need to get one, fast. The apartment manager is being a dick.” I picked up the letter that had been taped to the door last night and thrust it at him. “Do you have a name that can pass a background check?”

  Cazimir took the note and then tossed it on the counter. “Mais oui.”

  “Good. Then get your shit together and present yourself to the manager in 1C, okay? The last thing either of us need is to be evicted.”

  Cazimir waved a hand. That wasn’t a yes, but it was better than nothing.

  Chapter 16

  I had to weave through a small army of U-Hauls and rental pickup trucks to get to the Factory’s front door, which hosted a procession of mortals carrying boxes, suitcases, and furniture outside.

  I watched for several moments as these vampire groupies threw their belongings in the backs of trucks, then headed back inside for more. Every one of them was stone-faced except one girl who was crying openly, consoled by a friend who put an arm around her shoulder. Elliot and Brad the Goth struggled to maneuver a mattress into the back of a moving truck that was already packed with boxes. I saw pots and pans peeking out over the cardboard crates.

  Lark was really kicking them out. I counted half a dozen trucks and at least twenty mortals carrying things out, watching as they packed up their lives to leave the only home they’d known for who knew how long. Years for some of them. At least two of them were well into their forties and had probably been with vampires in one place or another for a good chunk of their lives. One guy with a little white in his beard saw me watching and gave me a sad smile. “Eviction,” he said, tapping the side of the truck.

  Anger simmered inside me. I couldn’t have picked more than a couple of these people out of a lineup if my life had depended on it. But it boiled my blood to see them kicked to the curb when there was plenty of space inside the Factory. There weren’t many vampires residing inside the former palace—less than six, at my last count—and I wondered where these people were going to go. How they’d support themselves. How they’d adjust to a world that didn’t run on vampire time.

  I had to shake it off and remind myself that it wasn’t my business and definitely not my problem. I had my own landlord to appease. If Cazimir had kicked these people out three months ago, I wouldn’t even have noticed, let alone spared a second to give a damn. So why did it bother me so much now?

  I could practically hear Neha’s voice in my head going, “Because you’re like them now.” But that wasn’t it. I might be human again, but I’m still a vampire in the depths of my soul. And besides, I’d always made my own way. Except for the first decade or so as an immortal, I’d always had a job and supported myself. Paid my bills by legal means ninety percent of the time. I’d been left to my own devices, but I’d never been helpless. I wondered how many of these vampire groupies would flounder without a place to crash and a steady supply of free ramen noodles.

  The sun had only just set, so I was surprised to find Lark in the front parlor. I had to admit the new flooring looked great. It was a rich wood, so dark it was almost black, and so polished it gleamed like glass. The old furniture that had evoked a haunted Victorian mansion had been replaced with hard, square black sofas and chairs that only had a thin layer of padding. Stylish furniture that looked horribly uncomfortable. The tables were all glass-topped and the light fixtures were stainless steel.

  Lark had one of the chairs pulled to the edge of the parlor and turned to face the foyer. She sat on it like a throne so she could monitor the evicted mortals. Maybe to make sure they didn’t try to abscond with priceless valuables or something.

  “Henri,” she said without looking away from the procession.

  “This is a mess,” I said. “Where are they going to go?”

  Lark lifted one shoulder in a half shrug. “I thought you found the concept of mortal familiars distasteful.”

  As a vampire, it hadn’t been a practice I’d indulged in. I hadn’t liked the idea of keeping a mortal close solely for blood, and I’d never become smitten enough with one to make them a lover or even a friend. Neha had been the only real mortal friend I’d ever had and look how well that turned out.

  “I do. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a dick move to pull the rug out from under them like this.”

  Lark glanced briefly up at me before turning her attention back to the people moving up and down the stairs. “The decision has been made. It will be a transition for some of them, but if their vampire partners don’t like it, no one is forcing them to stay. Honestly, most of the mortals who’ve been living here are not attached to any vampire. They’re vampire groupies who found their way here or people whose vampire partners have died or gone off to another part of the world and left them behind. These are the strays, the ones vying for attention from the vampires who pass through. Trust me. They’re better off elsewhere.”

  “Do you care if they are?” I asked.

  “Do you?” she countered.

  That brought me up short and I closed my mouth. I did, in a way, if only because it seemed shitty to wrench shelter and board away from people who’d come to rely on it. But it occurred to me what was really bothering me was the amount of change the Factory was undergoing. Living forever (or just a really long time) means you start clinging to the things that endure. When one of them crumbles, part of your world does, too. “Cazimir might,” I f
inally said.

  Lark pursed her lips. The mortals Cazimir had kept close to him—three, including Aidan—were all dead. If he’d been close to the others, he hadn’t mentioned it. If these were, as Lark put it, “strays,” then I doubted he’d care all that much, except to know she was fundamentally changing every aspect of the Factory he’d built. That would royally tick him off, pun intended, but there wasn’t a lot he could do about it, and Lark knew it.

  “I assume you came here because you have news about our reckless vampire problem,” she said, blatantly changing the subject.

  “Yeah. You might not like it.” I didn’t know how Lark felt about Fiona—only that Lark’s longtime lover, Thomas, now deceased, had been her sire.

  Making someone a vampire is necessarily intimate. It is not necessarily sexual—it often isn’t at all—but it does create a bond of sorts between the maker and the fledgling. Unlike in stories, vampires cannot control their fledglings. They don’t hold magical sway over them. But the connection is very real. This is the person who killed you and resurrected you. Even if you’d been strangers until those final moments, you are now bound together for eternity. Often vampires feel a fierce loyalty to their sires, at least until the sire does something to stop deserving it.

  That loyalty is not always a two-way street. Some vampires feel zero attachment to the ones they turn despite the connection, but that’s pretty rare. Some are less concerned with their fledglings than others. And it doesn’t mean that that vampire’s lovers or fellow fledglings are going to care about the new vampire at all.

  So I couldn’t begin to guess what Lark felt for Fiona, or if she’d felt anything for Kate, Neha’s now deceased girlfriend, whom Thomas had also turned. But if she did have a strong sense of loyalty and protectiveness over Thomas’s last fledgling, she sure as hell wasn’t going to like what I had to tell her.

  “Well?” Lark tapped her fingers impatiently on the armrests of the chair.