One Grave at a Time nh-6

by Jeaniene Frost

  Tate’s door was ajar. I went inside without knocking though I knew he wasn’t alone. Someone with a heartbeat was in there with him. A heartbeat, and too much cologne for a vampire’s sensitive nose.

  “Hey, Tate,” I said, noting how stiff his posture was despite the fact that he was sitting. The reason for his tenseness must be the tall, thin man who stood a few feet away from Tate’s desk. He had graying hair cut in the same high-and-tight style Tate favored, but something about his bearing suggested his hair was the only military influence he had. His stance was too relaxed, his hands boasting calluses that I’d bet came from pens versus weapons. His startled glance up revealed that he hadn’t known we were here until I spoke, either, and while vampires were stealthy, I’d made no attempt to conceal the sound of our approach.

  The arrogance in his stare once he recovered from his surprise made me mentally reclassify him from civilian to government desk jockey. Usually just two things accounted for such an immediate, overconfident attitude at a first meeting: a wealth of bad-ass undead abilities, or a person who firmly believed that his connections meant he could make his own rules. Since Mr. Cocky was human, that left the latter.

  “You must be the new operations consultant,” I said, smiling in a way that would look friendly to someone who didn’t know me.

  “Yes,” was his cool reply. “My name is—”

  “Jason Madigan,” Don completed the sentence the same time as the gray-haired government contractor. My uncle’s voice sounded strained, almost shocked. “What is he doing here?”

  Two

  I kept my attention on Madigan, not looking over at Don even though it was my first instinct. Mustn’t let on that there was a ghost in the room, and the question had been rhetorical since Don knew Madigan couldn’t hear him.

  “Cat Crawfield . . . Russell,” I introduced myself. Okay, Bones and I weren’t married according to human law, but by vampire standards, we were bound together tighter than a piece of paper could ever make two people.

  A wave of pleasure brushed against my subconscious, drifting out from the shields Bones had erected around himself as soon as our helicopter landed. He liked that I’d added the last name he’d been born with to my own. That was all the officiating I needed to decide that I’d be Catherine Crawfield Russell from this day forth.

  Even though I hadn’t needed Don’s reaction to deduce that Madigan was going to be a pain in my ass, years of strict farm-bred manners made it impossible for me not to offer my hand. Madigan looked at it for a fraction too long before shaking it. His hesitancy revealed that Madigan had a prejudice against women or vampires, neither of which endeared him any further to me.

  Bones stated his name with none of my hand-offering compulsions, but then again, his childhood had been spent begging or thieving to survive the harsh circumstances of being the bastard son of a prostitute in eighteenth-century London. Not being endlessly drilled about manners and respecting your elders like mine. He stared at Madigan without blinking, his hands resting inside the pockets of his leather coat, his half smile more challenging than courteous.

  Madigan took the hint. He dropped his hand from mine and didn’t attempt extending it to Bones. The faintest expression of relief might have even crossed his face, too.

  Prejudice against vampires, then. Perfect.

  “You were right, weren’t you?” Madigan said to Tate with a jovialness that rang false. “He did come with her.”

  For a second, my gaze flicked to Don. Good God, could Madigan see him? He was human, but maybe Madigan had some psychic abilities . . .

  “With vampires, if you invite one spouse, the other is automatically included as well,” Bones replied lightly. “That’s an age-old rule, but I’ll forgive you for not knowing it.”

  Oh, Madigan meant Bones. I stifled my snort. What he said was true, but even if it weren’t, Bones wouldn’t have stayed behind. I didn’t work here anymore, so it was not like I could be threatened with anything if Madigan didn’t like my attitude. And he wouldn’t, I could promise him that.

  “What’s up with the ID check on the roof?” I asked to steer things away from the staring contest between Madigan and Bones that the consultant would lose. No one could outstare a vampire.

  Madigan shifted his attention to me, his natural scent souring ever so slightly underneath its preponderance of chemical enhancement.

  “One of the oversights I noted when I arrived two days ago was that no one checked my identification when I landed. This facility is too important to be compromised by something as simple as sloppy security.”

  Tate bristled, hints of emerald appearing in his indigo eyes, but I just snorted.

  “If you’re arriving by air, they kinda figure that after they’ve double-checked the identity of the aircraft, the crew, and the flight plan, whoever’s inside is who they’re supposed to be. Especially if you invited those people here. But if they weren’t, and they still pulled all the rest of that off, fake ID would be the easy part. Besides”—another snort—“if anyone got here by air that didn’t belong, you think they’d be able to get away with their aircraft in weapons range and several vampires able to track them by scent alone?”

  Instead of being made defensive by my blunt analysis of how useless a roof ID check was, Madigan stared at me in a thoughtful way.

  “I heard you had difficulty with authority and following orders. Seems that wasn’t exaggerated.”

  “Nope, that’s true,” I replied with a cheery smile. “What else did you hear?”

  He waved a hand dismissively. “Too many things to list. Your former team raved about you so much I simply had to meet you.”

  “Yeah?” I didn’t buy that as the reason I was here, but I’d play along. “Well, whatever you do, ignore what my mom has to say about me.”

  Madigan didn’t even crack a smile. Uptight prick.

  “What does an operations consultant do, I wonder?” Bones asked, as if he hadn’t been busy using his mind-reading skills to eavesdrop in Madigan’s mind from the moment we arrived.

  “Ensures that the transfer of management in a highly sensitive Homeland Security department is as smooth as it needs to be for the sake of national security,” Madigan said, that smugness back in his tone. “I’ll be reviewing all records over the next few weeks. Missions, personnel, budgets, everything. This department is too critical to only hope that Sergeant Bradley is up for the task of running it.”

  Tate didn’t so much as twitch a brawny muscle even though the implied insult had to burn. For all the issues I’d had with him in the past, his competence, dedication, and work ethic had never been among them.

  “You won’t find anyone more qualified to run this operation now that Don’s gone,” I said with quiet steel.

  “That’s not why he’s here,” Don hissed. He’d been quiet for the past several minutes, but now he sounded more agitated than I’d ever heard him. Did becoming a ghost give my normally urbane uncle less control over his emotions, or did he and Madigan have a nasty history together?

  “He’s after something more important than auditing Tate’s job performance,” Don went on.

  “I’m particularly interested in getting caught up on your records,” Madigan said to me, oblivious to the other conversation in the room.

  I shrugged. “Knock yourself out. Hope you like stories about the bad guys—or girls—getting it in the end.”

  “My favorite kind,” Madigan replied with a glint in his eye that I didn’t care for.

  “Are Dave, Juan, Cooper, Geri, and my mom in the Wreck Room?” I asked, done with playing stupid word games. If I spent much more time with him, my temper might overcome my common sense, and that wouldn’t be good. The smartest thing would be to play docile and let Tate find out if Madigan was really sniffing around this operation for ulterior motives.

  “Why do you want to know their location?” Madigan asked, as if I had nefarious intentions he needed to protect them from.

  My smile hid th
e fact that I was gritting my teeth. “Because since I’m here, I want to say hi to my friends and family,” I managed to reply, proud of myself for not ending the sentence with dickhead.

  “Soldiers and trainees are too busy to drop what they’re doing just because a visitor wants to chat,” Madigan stated crisply.

  My fangs jumped out of their own accord, almost aching with my desire to tear the snotty expression right off Madigan’s lightly wrinkled face. Maybe some of that showed, because he followed that comment with, “I must warn you, any hostile actions toward me will be taken as an attack against the United States itself.”

  “Pompous prick,” Don snapped, striding over to Madigan before stopping abruptly, as if remembering there wasn’t a single thing he could do to him in his current state.

  A thread of warning edged into my furious emotions, Bones’s silent reminder for me to get control of myself. I did, forcing my fangs to retract and my eyes to return from sizzling green to their normal shade of medium gray.

  “Whatever would give you the idea that I’d attack you?” I asked, making my voice as innocent and surprised as I could while mentally folding him into the shape of a pretzel.

  “I might be new here, but I’ve extensively studied reports on your kind,” Madigan said, dropping his patronizing G-man façade to show the naked hostility underneath. “All of them show that vampires’ eyes change color right before they attack.”

  Bones laughed, a caressing sound that was at odds with the dangerous energy starting to push at his walls. “Bollocks. Our eyes turn green for reasons that have nothing to do with intent to kill—and I’ve seen vampires rip throats out without the slightest change in iris color. Is that the only experience you’ve had with vampires? Reports?”

  The last word was heavy with polite scorn. Madigan stiffened.

  “I’ve had enough experience to know that some can read minds.”

  “Shouldn’t concern you. Men with nothing to hide have nothing to fear, right, mate?”

  I waited to see if Madigan would nut up and accuse Bones of prying into his mind during this conversation, but he simply adjusted his wire-rim glasses as though their location on his nose was of prime importance.

  “Your mom and the others will be done with training in an hour,” Tate said, the first words he’d spoken since we’d come into his office. “You can wait here, if you’d like. Madigan was just leaving.”

  “Are you dismissing me?” Madigan asked with a touch of incredulity.

  Tate’s expression was bland. “Didn’t you say right before Cat got here that you’d had enough of me for the day?”

  Faint color rose in Madigan’s cheeks. Not embarrassment, from his scent spiking with hints of kerosene. Carefully controlled indignation.

  “I did,” he replied shortly. “You’ll have those reports for me in the morning? I assume staying up the rest of the night should be no hardship for someone like you.”

  Oh, what an asshole. My fangs did that let me at him! thing again, but this time, I kept them in my gums while also stifling the nosferatu green from leaping into my gaze.

  Then Madigan turned back to us. “Cat. Bones.” He said our names like we should apologize for them, but I just smiled as though I hadn’t already eviscerated him in my fantasies several times.

  “So great to meet you,” I said, holding out my hand again only because I knew he didn’t want to touch it.

  He took it with the same faint pause he’d shown last time. I didn’t squeeze once I had him in my grip, but oh, it was tempting.

  As soon as I let him go, Madigan swept out of Tate’s office, trailing a cloud of aftershave and irritation behind him.

  “I’m following him,” my uncle said flatly. “And I’m not going back with you later, Cat.”

  I glanced at Tate, who gave me a barely perceptible nod. In truth, I was relieved that he didn’t attempt to argue. Don could snoop on Madigan a hell of a lot more effectively than anyone else. Maybe Madigan was here because Uncle Sam was just being paranoid at having a vampire in charge of an operation that hunted and concealed evidence of the undead. If so, Madigan would waste a lot of taxpayer dollars by scrutinizing this operation only to come to the conclusion that Tate was an outstanding replacement for Don. His record was spotless, so I had no fear of Madigan’s unearthing any skeletons in Tate’s closet—real or metaphorical.

  But that wasn’t why I was glad my uncle was focusing more on Madigan than on finding his way to the eternal doorway for the other side. If Madigan had a more sinister reason for being here, Don could alert us faster than anyone else. I had faith in Tate, Dave, and Juan being able to get themselves out of here if Madigan’s dislike of the undead took a more menacing turn; but my mother, for all her bravado, wasn’t as tough as they were.

  And this wasn’t a regular building that she could just bust through a wall to escape from. The fourth sublevel was built to contain vampires against their will. I should know. I designed it back when I was capturing vampires so Don’s scientists could make a synthetic wonder drug called Brams. That drug, derived from the healing compound in undead blood, had kept several members of our team alive after they’d sustained grievous injury. Then Bones joined the operation, and Don got over his fear that raw vampire blood—far more effective in healing than Brams—would turn anyone evil who drank it. Bones donated enough of his blood for Don to parcel out to injured team members as needed, and the vampire cells on the fourth sublevel had remained empty for years as a result.

  But that didn’t mean they couldn’t be put back into use if Don was right and Madigan was here for other reasons than a routine evaluation.

  Or maybe I’d had so much shit happen lately that I assumed the worst about everyone now, whether I had valid reason to or not. I gave my head a shake to clear it. For all that Madigan pissed me off, it wasn’t too long ago that Don had had the same prejudice about vampires. Hell, it was just eight years ago that I’d thought the only good bloodsucker was a dead bloodsucker! Yes, Madigan’s attitude screamed Suspicious Bureaucratic Bastard, but hopefully his spending some time with Tate, Juan, Dave, and my mother would make him realize there was more to supernaturals than what he’d read in the pages of classified murder reports.

  “So, what do you think of him?” Tate drawled, the former tightness now gone from his tone.

  “That he and I won’t be BFFs,” was all I said. No need to say more when this room could be bugged.

  Tate grunted. “I’m getting that vibe, too. Maybe it’s a good thing that . . . circumstances are what they are.”

  By Tate’s careful allusion to Don’s condition, it was obvious that he, too, was taking no chances over our words being played back to Madigan later.

  I gave a concurring shrug. “I suppose everything does happen for a reason.”

  Three

  By the time Bones and I got in our car on our last leg home, it was only an hour before dawn. We could’ve gotten back to our Blue Ridge house quicker if we’d flown the whole way, but it was less flashy to keep our helicopter at the local private airport. Even though our nearest neighbor was over two dozen acres away, a helicopter coming and going tended to attract a lot more notice than a car. The lower our profile in our home area, the better.

  Once in our car, however, Bones and I could speak freely. The first item on my To Do list after I got some sleep was to have the helicopter swept for bugs, and I didn’t mean of the insect variety. Madigan struck me as the type who’d consider it standard operational procedure to have listening and tracking devices planted on our chopper while Bones and I were at the compound. Hell, when I first started with the team and everyone worried that I’d turn to the dark side, Don had bugged my vehicle and had me followed twenty-four/seven. It took my uncle years to trust me enough to drop the surveillance and wire taps. Something told me Madigan would take even longer.

  “So what’s it like in his mind?” I asked.

  Bones gave me a sideways glance as he navigated up the winding roads
. “Murky. He clearly suspects my abilities and has fabricated a decent defense against them.”

  “Really?” Madigan hadn’t struck me as having the exceptional mental fortitude necessary to prevent Bones’s mind reading, but guess that meant I’d underestimated him.

  “He repeats rhymes nonstop in his head, making that the majority of what I hear,” Bones replied with grudging admiration. “Managed to pick up a few things past them, like how he believes dousing himself in cologne will negate a vampire’s ability to scent his emotions and that he despised Don. The mere mention of your uncle’s name caused a spate of insults to appear in his thoughts.”

  “Don didn’t seem too fond of him, either.”

  I’d have to ask my uncle about their history the next time I saw him. Maybe it was as simple as rivalry over a woman; that had been enough to start the Trojan War, after all. Still, as long as Madigan kept his actions aboveboard, whatever had happened between him and Don in the past didn’t matter. Madigan thought my uncle was dead and gone. He didn’t know he was right on only one of those counts.

  “He also deeply distrusts vampires, as you had guessed yourself,” Bones added. “Aside from that, all I heard was enough repetitions of ‘how many chucks could a woodchuck chuck’ to make me want to stake myself.”

  I laughed. Maybe underneath Madigan’s pompousness and prejudice, there lurked a sense of humor. That gave me hope. Pride wasn’t the world’s worst flaw, and vampire prejudice could be overcome with time. But the lack of a sense of humor was an insurmountable defect, in my opinion.

  “Makes me grateful my mind-reading skills were on the fritz earlier.”