My rosebud. It’s gone.
Jeez, Gina, don’t scare me like that.
A smile curled my lips. I couldn’t help it. He was so much fun to play with. And he’d been pleasingly mesmerized by that rosebud before I left, so I was pretty sure he’d mourn the loss.
Sorry, I said, faking sincerity. I wanted to make sure I had your attention.
Always.
Not earlier.
Okay, always when I’m not at the bedside of a girl who’s just lost her family and barely lived to tell the tale.
The little Swinter girl?
He nodded. I can’t really explain it better than that. It was more a feeling of yes than the words to go with it.
She’s not saying much. I don’t think she considers it a victory that she’s still alive, and she’s going to carry those scars forever.
I couldn’t even imagine. Not really. I’d lost my family when I’d been vamped, but—well, I could still see them. They just couldn’t be allowed to see me. They’d been so busy jet-setting even before my “death” that the difference barely registered. Really.
Scars? I asked.
Emotional and physical. Someone chowed down on her. The marks resemble vampire bites, but … these aren’t going to heal like the real thing. They’re going to be a constant reminder of the attack.
Poor kid, I answered. The need to fake sincerity had fallen straight away. I tried to imagine what the girl was going through and couldn’t. Did she tell you anything helpful?
She didn’t say her sister was involved.
But you think she might be? I interpreted.
It’s all in her silences. Bobby fell silent himself for a second, as if some kind of emergency broadcast was interrupting his signal.
Bobby? I called.
Where are you? he asked, sounding suddenly urgent.
Well, that’s what I was calling to tell you …
Marcy says she and Brent lost sight of you a while ago and now there’s a raid—
Police raid?
He agreed, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Not fire, then … or psycho killer. Anything else, Marcy and Brent should be able to handle. The Feds had cleared the agency’s involvement with the locals, but blowing cover wasn’t exactly in our mission statement. Marcy and Brent’s IDs ought to hold. If you couldn’t count on the Feds to forge decent documents, who could you trust?
So, you’re where? he prompted
Sticking to the plan, I promised. I’ve laid out our proposition. They’ve, ah, locked me up. Just ’til they can check me out, I assured him. But in case there’s any problem I wanted to let you know they’ve got me stuck in some dungeony room inside the Tower. I did my best to send him a mental map.
Got it. Stay safe, he ordered.
I debated how many fingers to use in my salute. I wasn’t so good at taking orders, even the semi-sweet, overprotective, macho-boyfriend type. My parents had been pretty hands-off. The Feds only cared about me as an investment they wanted to mature. To have someone actually care … I still hadn’t figured out quite how to react.
I heard a sound then and froze, trying to determine if it was in or outside of my head. There was a follow-up click-click. Out. Definitely out.
I sent Bobby a quick Gotta go and started as I met the unblinking gaze of an eye-level Selene. She’d squatted to facilitate the face-to-face, somehow managing not to pull a Lindsay Lohan in her teeny tiny skirt. She smiled at my reaction. Not that it reached those cold, moonless-midnight eyes; the faux vampiress at the Tower door had it all wrong with her kitty-cat contacts. I wondered if my own eyes would go as dark and dim as Selene’s after long enough of been there, bitten that, have the bloody T-shirt to prove it. Unh uh. No flippin’ way. I had a lot of life in me yet. Just, you know, not literally.
After what I’d heard from Bobby, I didn’t have a lot of patience for games. “You gonna kiss me or kill me?” I asked.
She was highly unimpressed by my bravado. “Tell me about the proposal you made to Lucas,” she ordered. She didn’t bother to put any oomph behind it. Not that it would have worked on me, but usually vamps tried. They couldn’t help themselves. Ms. Mini-skirt seemed to count on her intimidating display of legs and her winning personality to get me to talk.
“If you tell me what the trouble was upstairs,” I answered, since I wasn’t supposed to know and was curious, anyway, about why the police had raided.
“I’ll ask the questions,” she stated, her voice as flat as her eyes. I determined right then to get a rise out of her. Maybe not the healthiest decision I’d ever made, but what good was eternal life if you didn’t live a little?
“Sure,” I answered agreeably. “Ask away.”
“Tell me all about it. The Truth.” She spoke in capitals. You could just hear it.
I blinked, and took a few unnecessary breaths just to mark the passing of time before breaking eye contact to study my nails. In case you’re wondering whether nails grow after death—
Selene growled. Low, like a junkyard dog with the teeth to back up the threat, not the loud rumble of a big, bad bluff.
I looked up and met her gaze again. “Oh, you want me to answer,” I said, feigning surprise. “Well, then, how about a little tit for tat? As I told Very Scary up there, I plan to become a valuable resource. A little respect would be nice.”
“Respect is earned.”
“Yeah, I read that in a fortune cookie once. So go ahead, start earning.”
Oh, her eyes sparked now. “You do know the order out on you is Kill or Capture, right? I don’t think the council’s terribly picky about how many pieces you come in.”
“No, but I’m worth more as a set.”
She seemed to take that in as a breath and rose again to her full height as she rolled it around on her tongue like I’d seen my father do with a wine he’d chosen with dinner. An actual expression threatened to mar the Ice Queen of the Damned thing she had going on, and it was … confusion? Surprise? She covered it quickly, but—
“Tell me more about that.”
“About Bobby? Geez, I’d think you guys would have a dossier by now. He’s my sire and we’re pretty much like this.” I put my middle finger over my index to show how tight we were—at least when we could find a deserted hallway or a free second at spook central. That boy could kiss. “The deal is: you make us a sweet offer, we’ll take you up on it.”
Selene was carefully trying for blank, but not quite achieving it. If I had to guess at the look, I’d peg it as frustration. “Say that again.”
I looked at her funny. Something was wrong. Yet I had a strange feeling it wasn’t my problem.
“Make us a sweet offer,” I repeated, “and we’re all yours.”
Her look didn’t clear. If anything, it was deeper, darker, brows lowered like she was trying to puzzle something out.
It came to me in a flash. “You’re a truth-teller!” I blurted.
I’d read about them in the Federal files. You’d think homework would end with death, but you’d be wrong. College or spy school, it was all the same, though the exams tended to be a little more intense when your life depended on passing. Speaking of the spooks, Sid and Maya would give the sticks up their butts to learn about Selene. Truth-tellers were legendary. As in literally the stuff of legends. None seen for, like, decades.
She didn’t answer, but on a gut level I knew I was right. Points to me. For figuring it out and for being totally—what was the word?—inscrutable. I wasn’t sure I had that right. Could someone be inscrutable when they couldn’t be scrutable to begin with? I’d have to ask Bobby.
I somehow didn’t think Selene would tell me. Right now, her lips were smooshed like two slices of bread in a panini press.
A victory dance probably wasn’t a sound survival strategy.
“Look, I have all night, apparently,” I said, glancing pointedly at the dungeon walls. “But I can think of better ways to spend it. So why don’t we cut to the chase? You want what I have but you do
n’t trust me yet to get it for you. Tell me how to change that.”
She eyed me coldly. “For one, if we let you out, you will not speculate to your federal friends about my supposed abilities. I don’t think true death would become you.”
Oh no, she did not just threaten my life and tell me I’d make an ugly corpse.
“Of course,” I answered with false sweetness. “Your secret’s safe with me.”
“Next, you are here to find Nelson Ricci, yes? The bloody boy who goes by Dion?”
I was so surprised at how well-informed she was that I just stared. I was supposed to win her trust. It certainly made things easier on me if I could do that by telling her something she already knew. “How did you—?”
“When you find him, you will bring him to us.”
My brain fell all over itself trying to figure that one out. He was a boy. A sociopathic boy to be sure, but still. What could the vamps want with him? Maybe to pin a medal on his chest for cutting his fellow humans down to size, evening out the vamp-to-human ratio one kill at a time? But in the grand scheme of things …
“Why?” I asked. “I mean, I don’t care who has him, but why would you want him?” For that matter, what had the Feds so interested? His crimes were horrible, of course, but federal? I wasn’t so sure.
“I don’t see that it’s any business of yours.”
“I’ve never been good with ‘just do as you’re told,’ ” I said honestly. “I’m looking for more freedom, not less.” I gave her my most unblinking stare.
“Right now, you’re a mere foot soldier. You follow orders, no questions asked. When—if—you work your way up to General, you’ll have all the freedom you could want.”
Military analogies—really?
“Fine, I’ll bring you the head of Nelson Ricci.”
“Alive,” she said.
I huffed. “I never said the rest of his body wouldn’t be attached. So, Nelson Ricci. Anything else I can get for you? Chill pill? Breath mint?”
Selene growled again, but deep down I suspected I was growing on her.
“Screw orders,” she mumbled. “I bet you’d snap like a twig.” But then she got herself under control. “I’ll send someone to let you out.”
She whirled gracefully for the door and marched herself out. A second later, I was alone with nothing but time
to think.
That was when I realized that Selene had never answered my questions. I’d been so caught up in my victory over her mental mojo that I hadn’t noticed. Apparently, truth-telling wasn’t her only interrogational skill. Her evasion topped the charts. Something else occurred to me as well—Selene could have let me out herself as easily as arranging to have it done. I’d figured it was a power thing, like “I’m too high and mighty for manual labor,” but what if there was more to it? Thinking back, I realized I’d never seen Selene touch a thing. Not the panels that slid out of her way, the bars of my prison or, heaven forbid, me. Yet the snap me like a twig comment led me to believe she could grab me if she wanted to. So why? My mind boggled. A vampire germaphobe? Silly but not impossible. If personalities survived death, why not phobias? Or maybe, having a legendary power herself, she was truly paranoid of other potential powers, like telemetry. I’d learned about that in the same file where I’d read about truth-telling. It was the power to read the history of a person, place, or thing by touching it. Maybe she didn’t want to leave any kind of trace. Or maybe I was making magic out of molehills.
• • •
We need to talk, I thought at Bobby as I left the Tower, the tiny Batphone the vamps had given me for making contact tucked down into my cleavage.
There was a momentary delay, during which I was sure he wasn’t listening, and then he answered distractedly, Meet you back at base.
Not there.
I could feel his surprise and his sudden full attention. What’s up?
As far as I knew, the Feds still hadn’t learned to eavesdrop on mental speak, but it was hard to figure what to say when I hardly knew myself what I was thinking. Both the Feds and the vamps were hiding something, I was sure, but what? It might be more secure talking to Bobby in mind-speak, but some things, like potential conspiracies, took hashing out in person. Anyway, if the Tampa vamps had eyes on me, it would help my story to be seen luring Bobby away from our handlers for some private conversation, as long as they kept to their agreement to let me bring him in willingly.
I don’t know exactly what’s up, but … I think maybe we should put our heads together and figure it out.
Huh?
I stood just outside the club exit, a little apart from the smokers. Clearly the police raid hadn’t scared everyone off. In fact, on my way out of the Tower, escorted by Selene’s goon squad, I didn’t notice much thinning of the crowd from earlier. It could be that raids only added to the mystique of the place.
I looked around for somewhere to ask Bobby to meet me—a late-night coffee shop or something—but I was back in the alleyway I’d entered from and there was nothing to be seen but the back end of other warehousey businesses. Very scenic.
The club door opened behind me. We’ll talk later, I told Bobby, turning with the expectation of trouble.
Framed in the doorway, the backlighting turning his sandy brown hair an antique gold, was the Indiana Jones of the Burgess Brigade.
He slipped out, closing the door behind him, killing the glow. I stepped aside to give him room to pass, but he moved right along with me, his eyes meeting mine and holding in a way that said we weren’t meeting in a dark alley by accident. If I’d thought about his eyes at all, it was with the expectation that they’d be brown like the rest of him, but instead they were a deep moss green.
“Cosette?” he asked.
“Yes, and you are?”
“Hunter.” He gave a courtly kind of bow that I could get used to. Men didn’t exactly bow down before me on a daily basis, something I considered a cosmic injustice.
“You want something?” I asked, cautious despite the bow. I’d gotten in with the true vamps just as I was supposed to, but I hadn’t forgotten that there were humans behind the violence I’d seen in the Feds’ photos. Even if he’d been exiled, Dion had been one of the lifestylers and might still have allies among them. Hunter could very well be one of the unidentified shadows from the film.
“Walk with me?” he asked.
“Why not.” It wasn’t like I couldn’t take him … in a fair fight.
Pleased, Hunter raised a hand as if to put it to my back, to guide me out of the alley, but then hesitated and dropped it without making contact. Somehow, I managed to turn all on my own and make it to the street.
“Where to?” I asked. Maybe I could find a good place for Bobby and me to meet during the walk.
“This way,” he answered, and started toward the left, in the direction that seemed darker and less likely to lead to any other signs of late-night civilization. If I weren’t a vamp, I might be worried.
We walked in silence for half a minute, which was about all I could take. “Just spill,” I told him.
“Excuse me?”
“You asked me to walk with you for a reason, and you haven’t once gawked at my legs”—flashing with every step because of the hip-high slits—“so I know that’s not it. There’s something else you want.”
He slid a look at my legs now that I’d pointed them out, and an appreciative smile lit his face. “Hold on a second. I might just have to revise my priorities.”
“Down boy,” I ordered. Because, for one, while he was easy on the eyes, he was also, like, old. Maybe even thirty. For another, I was taken.
He sighed and stopped walking, turning to study me with a near-religious intensity. Those moss-green eyes did intensity really well.
“You’re one of them, aren’t you?” he asked finally.
“One of who?”
“Them.”
Clear as mud.
“Look, if that’s what this is all about, we can tu
rn around right now.” I started to do that very thing.
“Hear me out,” he insisted, putting a hand on my arm to stop me. I glanced at the hand until he regained his senses and removed it. “Look, I’ve read Rachel Caine and Faith Hunter and all that. I know about human servants. I want to offer myself.”
I blinked. Since he thought of me as some higher life form, I didn’t want to blurt out “Huh?” and ruin the whole thing, but it was right on the tip of my tongue.
“You need a daysider, right?” he rushed on, probably seeing my lack of on-boardness. “I noticed you don’t have anyone with you. No entourage or anything. I figured you might be new and that I could—”
“Stop.” I held up a hand to reinforce the command, and he paused like I’d hit a button on the universal remote. I had to process this. Nothing in the Federal files had talked about human servants. I mean, yeah, the vampire vixen that Bobby and I’d escaped from when we’d first risen had employed humans to work for her, and sometimes she used her mental mojo to assure obedience, but they weren’t exactly her servants. I didn’t know what all they got out of the arrangement, except probably a salary and the hope of becoming one of us with good behavior.
I had always wanted an entourage, but I didn’t see how it would fit in with my super-secret life. Plus, I couldn’t imagine Bobby’d be too happy with “He followed me home, can I keep him?”
“I understand; you’ve only just met me,” Hunter continued, apparently unable to hold his silence. “Let me prove to you how useful I can be.”
Something moved in the shadows. “Let’s walk,” I said abruptly, suddenly on high alert. The vamps wanted something from me I hadn’t yet delivered, so whatever I’d seen—too big to be an alley cat—had to be human. No problem. Unless, of course, they were armed with pointy sticks, garlic, and holy water. Doubtful, but hey, if people could go around thinking they were vampires or the second coming of Charles Mad-eye Manson, like Dion did, then others could surely believe themselves vampire hunters. Without stakes, whatever stalked us didn’t stand a chance against me, but I wasn’t exactly cruising for a fight. I might break a newly polished nail.
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