She barked. Well, it sounded like a cross between a growl and a bark, and it wasn't the sound I was expecting. "I want you over here— now!" She spat out the address and slammed down the phone. I pushed the disconnect button. The phone rang again before I could even put it down.
Cam sounded about eight years old. "Harper? Did my mom call you?"
"Yes. She just hung up."
"Is she still upset?"
"Upset would be a very mild description. I have been ordered into the presence at once. How 'bout you?"
"Me, too. Umm… do you want to go together? I could pick you up."
"I think separate cars would be better. There's no guarantee we'd be leaving at the same time."
"All right. I'll see you over there."
I hung up and went looking for my shoes. I tickled my computer and got it to spit out a copy of my bill, just in case.
On the way to Bellevue, I considered what I was heading into. I hadn't really expected Cameron to try the truth on her quite so soon, and I hadn't any idea how Colleen Shadley would react once I arrived. I supposed that she wanted me out there so she could fire me or demand answers she liked better than her son's. I didn't think she'd like mine any better, but since I'd already completed the task, she couldn't fire me.
She could refuse the bill, though, and that would be unpleasant. I hadn't had to remind a client of nonpayment in a long time and I didn't look forward to it. Colleen was the lawyers-and-litigation type, without a doubt, and Nan Grover wouldn't like having to choose between a friend and me. No matter what happened, it wasn't going to be fun.
The Shadley house sprawled in one of the horse-trail suburbs where the yards run to an acre or two around houses of equal size. I had to wander a bit to get into the nest of twisted streets and up the curving, grumpy rises to the rambling stone house that hung back from the street like a shy child behind a screen of cypress trees. Cameron's green Camaro stood in the driveway.
The air near the house flickered a bit to my gaze and familiar, cold nausea slid a bodkin along my ribs. I looked sideways at the curtain between here and there, probing the dark spots until I thought I had looked into them all. I caught the shape…
"Hi," he said, and I twitched, not quite prepared. Cam was waiting in the shadows of the trellised entry. "I didn't want to go in without you."
"Afraid your mother will eat you?" I asked.
"Sort of. I've never heard her this mad. I mean, she yells at Sarah once in a while, but not like this. She's hot."
"I noticed." I took a few deep, slow breaths before continuing. "All right. Let's beard the lioness." I rang the bell. The porch light came on and the door wrenched open.
Colleen glared at both of us and directed us in. Cam, the coward, let me go first. She led us into a stiff, formal room. I shot a glance at Cameron and he made a grimace. This must have been the child-free zone of his youth, approached only on formal occasions or under parental indictment. We were being called onto the antique Chinese carpet.
Cameron's mother sat down on the pale cream sofa and pointed us at narrow-backed chairs without armrests. I sat on the love seat across from her instead. After a second's pause, Cameron sat next to me.
Colleen reined in a scowl, but didn't comment. "I would like an explanation out of both of you. Now."
Cameron started to answer, "Mo—"
I cut him off with a hand gesture, presenting his mother a bland face. "Of what, Colleen?"
"Of this phone call I had from Cameron this evening. Of what is really going on. Now, please."
"I think we need some clarification first," I suggested, sitting back and stretching out my legs to their full, space-hogging length. I crossed my booted feet at the ankle, heels pointing at her in insouciant despite. "You hired me to find your son and I have, unless you claim that this young man is not your son. Is he?"
"Yes, of course he is," she replied. "But—"
"Then you agree that I've supplied the service you contracted for."
She hedged. "Up to a point."
"There was no other point agreed on in the contract or our discussion, Colleen. As his mother, you were concerned for your son. As the executrix of his trust fund, you were concerned for your trustee. Here he is—son and trustee, whole and sound. I'm willing to discuss the case with you insofar as it doesn't intrude on Cameron's privacy—even further with his permission. But, professionally and ethically, that's all I will do."
She glowered, but she also knew I had her, as far as contracts were concerned. "Very well, then. You can send me your bill and go now."
Cameron was vibrating with tension, his flickering making me dizzy. "I want her to stay. Mom, I'm sorry I tried to run away from my problem and that I didn't get in touch with you a lot earlier, but I knew you would have a hard time with this. I had a hard time with it, and I'm still having a hard time. I wish you'd cut me some slack."
"Slack? You sound just like your sister. You think you'll be handled with kid gloves if you just whine enough."
"I'm not whining. I'm trying to explain," he said, shooting his arms out to the side and nearly smacking me. I refused to flinch.
She snapped back at him. "Evading and lying is more to the point. You can't imagine how disappointed I am in you."
"Actually, Mom, I've got a pretty good idea. I got in over my head. I did some stupid things. I'm disappointed in me, too. But that doesn't change the situation. I'm still… what I am," he finished, dropping his hands between his knees.
"A vampire? Cameron, really!"
"Smile, Cameron," I suggested.
He rolled his eyes at me and made an ugly grimace. His lips peeled back from his teeth and his too-sharp canines glinted in the light. Colleen recoiled and stared.
"Andrew Cameron! Stop that. Who did you persuade to mutilate your teeth like that?"
"They're not fake, Mom," he said. "They came with the outfit, so to speak. So did this." He shimmered a little and became Grey. I spotted him right off this time, and grinned.
Ignoring me, Colleen jerked forward. "Cameron! Cameron! Stop that! Stop it!" she yelled. She turned her glare on me again.
I shook my head, stone-faced again. "No smoke and mirrors here."
She reached out and flailed at what seemed to her thin air. She slapped her son on the shoulder.
"Ow!" he yelped and shimmered back into the normal.
She grabbed on to him with both hands, which pulled her off the sofa. She crouched on the floor in front of him and held on tight to his upper arms.
"What did you do? Where did you go?" she demanded.
"I was right here, Mom. You just couldn't see me. I don't know how it works. I just concentrate on being gone and I disappear." He tried to shrug, but she held him too hard. "It just comes with the job, I guess."
"Can you do it while she's touching you?" I asked, half curious, half hoping to prove something to Cameron's mother.
"I can try." He shimmered away again as Colleen held on for dearest life.
She let out a wail and plopped onto her backside. "Cameron!"
He came back. "I'm still here, Mom."
"Oh, my God," she gasped and put her hands up to her face. Oblivious of her makeup, she rubbed her cheeks and temples and smeared her hands up into her hair. "My God, my God." She crumpled into a ball and began sobbing.
"Mom! Mom, it's OK. It's all right. I'm not going to hurt you or anything." He crouched down on the rug beside his mother and put his arms around her. "Mom? Are you OK?"
She wailed and pressed the top of her head against her son's chest. He rocked her and babbled soothing words. I stood up and looked around.
"Kitchen?" I asked.
"Out the other door and through the dining room," Cameron whispered, jerking his head toward a door we had not used before.
I nodded and went out.
Somehow, Colleen Shadley didn't strike me as the sort to resort to hard liquor for shock. I made tea. While it was brewing, though, I hunted up a bottle of cognac and
put a good dose of the stuff into one of the cups. I juggled three full cups back out to the sitting room.
Cameron had gotten his mother back on the sofa, though she was still clinging to him a bit and sniffling.
I handed her the cup with the potent brew. "This'll help. Better drink it."
Cameron found her a box of tissues as she snuck up on her first sip. She shuddered and made a face, but took a scalding gulp and then another. Then she took a tissue and dabbed at her smeared eyes and blew her nose in a delicate, ladylike fashion.
"I–I—that wasn't good of me," she said.
Cameron patted her arm. "Mom. It's OK. You were… shocked. It's OK."
She nodded her head and drank some more tea. She set the cup down on the glass-covered table beside the sofa. "I'm sorry," she said. "I can't take any more of that muck. I need a drink."
So much for my assessment of character.
Cameron got up and went looking for liquor. Colleen, face streaked with mascara and lipstick, looked at me and raised her eyebrows.
"What am I going to do?" she asked.
Chapter 20
"Improvise." Her eyes were chasms of confusion. She started shaking her head. "No, no. I don't 'improvise. I plan things, I prepare for contingencies. This is—this is not something I have any plan for."
I started thinking out loud. "I suppose you could think of it as it Cameron had an exotic medical condition that requires a change of lifestyle. He's still your son. He's still a decent, intelligent young man. He's just… different."
Her mouth turned down in distaste. "You sound like a counselor." Cameron came back with the cognac bottle and some glasses. He poured generous measures for all of us. I gave him a sharp look.
He returned a "what?" look and a shrug. "It's alcohol, I can practically absorb it through my skin. It's not going to hurt me." He sat down next to his mother.
We sipped. Colleen Shadley gulped. She shuddered and finished off her drink.
"All right, Cam," she gasped, setting the glass down, "tell me how this happened. Help me understand it."
He refilled her glass, avoiding meeting her eyes. "Well, Mom, the details are kind of unpleasant. I did something I felt was necessary, but I did it badly. Can't we just say that it happened because I thought I knew more than I did?"
"All right. Someday I expect to get the whole story out of you, but I can let that go for now. Go on with the rest."
"I met someone who wasn't very pleasant and he took advantage of me, because I wasn't as clever as I thought."
Colleen stiffened and began to cough on alcohol fumes. She waved Cameron away as he tried to help and caught her breath on her own. "Go on," she repeated. Her eyes watered. She dabbed at them as her son talked. "I got sick."
"I remember you were ill for a while after Christmas." "More like February, Mom, but it doesn't matter. Anyhow, I was mega-sick and I didn't know why. And when I found out, I didn't know what to do. So I tried to get some help, but things haven't worked out so well. I've got a few problems to settle before everything will be… acceptable. But the plain fact is I'm a vampire, and that's not going to change. It can't be undone. I just have to live with it—or unlive with it," he added and laughed. His mother made a face. "Oh, come on, Mom. It's a joke." She mumbled her discomfort. "Mom, can you live with it?"
This time, Colleen played with her glass. "I suppose I don't have a choice. You're my son. I can't just pretend you've ceased to exist. I can't—I couldn't bring myself to… do anything to you. Are—are you really all right?"
"As all right as this gets. Better, now that you know. Harper and I are working on the rest. See, I have a plan now, like you always tell me. So it's going to be OK. But I could use some of your help, too, Mom."
"My help? What can I do?" She sounded younger than her son. "We'll have to work out some new arrangements with the trust—I can't go to classes in the daytime. And I need to make some new living arrangements, too. My car's nice, but the trunk is kind of cramped."
Her smile wobbled. "I'm sure we can think of something. Oh, Cameron, why couldn't you have gotten into some normal kind of trouble?"
"Just precocious, I guess."
We sat around the white room for another hour, working out details—including my billing. By the time I left I was envying Cam his cozy bed in the trunk of the Camaro. I dragged myself home to my own, head bobbing like a somnolent drinky-bird's all the way.
When I got out of bed, noon was cracking overhead with the bing-bang-bong of the Catholic clock. I rushed for my office.
My first job was contacting Lenore Fabrette to say I could pay for the information. She replied that she'd gotten it and would bring it on Thursday, as planned.
I tried to make a little more sense out of the TPM papers I already had and the new ones that came in over the fax, but most of it was too dense with corporate legalese to plow through with speed. I set the pile aside and made more phone calls, phone calls, phone calls. I had a date for dinner with a friend and I didn't want to miss a moment of normalcy before diving into an evening of interviewing vampires.
Even at a quarter to eleven, it seemed that the vampire community was still just waking up. It was nearly midnight before I found Alice in the top-floor lounge of a downtown hotel.
The host at the door pointed her out to me: a petite woman with deep red hair and the same shadowy, filmy-gleaming eyes that Cameron exhibited. She lurked at a corner table, watching. I skirted around the dance floor and approached.
"Hi," I started. "Are you Alice Liddell?"
She looked up from under arched brows. "At the moment." She stretched one corner of her broad mouth into a smile and floated a hand at my side of the table. Alternating waves of heat and cold flushed over me. "Why don't you sit down?" she offered. My knees resisted a bit as I sat across from her, frowning as I wrestled with my sense of familiarity.
Her amused, silent evaluation hammered my spine with spikes of frozen fire. I didn't have to look sideways to see that all light around her seemed to have been sucked away, leaving a pulsing corona of dark red around her pale face. I checked my shudder and stared back at her. My stomach did a slow roll. Apparently, vampires brought their Grey effects with them, whether I liked it or not.
Her voice was chill velvet, stroking over my skin. "How do you happen to come looking for me?"
I had to swallow before I could talk. "Cameron Shadley sent me. My name is Harper Blaine—"
She seemed to be on the verge of laughing—a sound I did not want to hear. "Yes, I know. Do you smoke?" she purred, picking up an old-fashioned cigarette case from the table. "Oh, no. Of course you don't. You're one of those delicious, healthy people." She extracted a pale cigarette from the case with the tips of her long, manicured nails and placed it between her lips with all the slow tease of a golden-age movie siren. She could have ignited it with her own heat. Instead, she used a slim gold lighter and let her first drag ooze out of her mouth. It made a rising blue veil between us. "What does Cameron think I can do for you?"
"You know about his problems with Edward?"
"Of course."
"I think he was hoping you could offer some kind of entree."
She chuckled and I felt a pain in my stomach. "How delicious," she said, twisting my meaning. Her teeth showed a little. They seemed very wet and very sharp. "Just how well do you know Cameron?"
"Why? Are you not in the habit of dining on the friends of friends?" I shot back. "Cameron is my client and I know a vampire when I see one." I glared at her and refused to drop my eyes, even though her gaze razored my spine. I wanted to throw up, or scream, or anything that would make her stop looking at me, but I clenched my teeth and sat still.
She played with her cigarette. "What an interesting proposition you are, Ms. Blaine. I wonder if you appreciate it."
"Probably, considering I believe you could snap my spine before I could see you move," I replied. "But Cameron knows where I am and how to find me just as well as you do. So, do you wan
t to break my neck or do you want to help us?"
She hummed a cloud of smoke at me and propped her pointed chin in her hand. "Oh, I want to help, believe me. Cameron's a… sweet boy." She smirked and sat back in her chair, sipping at her glass of… something. "What does he think I can do for you?"
"Cameron has been having problems… adjusting. He's hired me to help make some kind of reconciliation with Edward and work out a way to receive the mentoring he didn't get. He suggested that you might be sympathetic to his position."
"Sympathy is expensive. What are you offering in exchange for my help?"
"That depends on what you bring to the table. If you can give information or make a suggestion that helps me out, I may be able to help you. So…?"
"Kill him."
"Edward?"
"Of course."
"Is that your suggestion or just what you want?"
"Both." She leaned forward, trying to snare me with her stare. "Edward's been in charge long enough, and he's getting long in the tooth, making mistakes. Just look at Cameron. And he doesn't even know about you. And what kind of leader is that, who can't even protect us from one little boy and his" — she looked me over again, licking smoke from her lips—"very interesting friend."
I felt like something nasty was sliding over me as I looked back into her eyes.
She continued, grinning very slightly. "I think it's time we had someone a little younger in charge. Someone more capable of sympathizing with a young man in a hard spot. Someone with sharper teeth. Her lips closed slowly over the knife-edge gleam of her canines.
I felt myself leaning forward, breathing shallow, numb breaths. "You hate him."
She raised her eyebrows. "Hate? Oh, yes." She hissed voluptuous delight. "With every drop of borrowed blood. It would be so easy for you to attack in daylight when he's weakest. You don't even have to kill him, just show his weakness."
"I'm not getting it."
Greywalker g-1 Page 19
