by Cate Lawley
Alex had whisked me through the shop and back into a far corner of the warehouse, where Cornelius’s office was located.
Upon the introductions, he’d insisted I call him Cornelius, even though I suspected Wembley’s use of his last name was more typical.
I liked him instantly.
He may have ruled with an iron fist “back in the day”—whenever “the day” was—but he showed no hint of that ruthless persona today.
“Please, have a seat.” Cornelius indicated one of two chairs situated across from his desk. Before taking a seat himself, he pulled out a bottled water from a small fridge next to his desk and handed it to me. “I hope Wembley hasn’t filled your head with his paranoid suspicions. Too much weed back in the eighties and nineties, I suspect.”
I choked on the sip of water I’d just taken.
Alex dropped down into the seat next to mine and assumed a relaxed pose.
Cornelius continued as if I’d not been so rude as to sputter water on his beautiful desk. “A good sort, Wembley, just a little slow to see the changing times. He’s convinced we’re all still secretly living by the rules of fifty years past. That we’re conspiring to bring back the Inquisition.”
I bit my lip and kept my mouth shut. I’d been told to listen—so I was going to do my darnedest to actually listen.
My face must have given away my surprise, because Cornelius smiled with a twinkle in his eye. “A turn of phrase for harsher times. We’re weren’t truly so bad as the Inquisition.”
Alex shifted uneasily in his seat.
“Come now, Alex. Swift justice, yes. But we tried to be as fair as the times and our circumstances allowed.” Cornelius sighed. “Nowadays it’s the best we can do to make sure our membership stay below the unenhanced radar, pay their taxes, and generally keep the peace amongst our own kind. It’s more administrative hassle and less magical sword-swinging these days.”
I blinked. Magical swords?
“But that’s neither here nor there.” Cornelius’s eyebrows pulled together. “We have a serious matter on our hands.”
And with those few words, I was in seventh grade standing before Vice Principal Swenson all over again.
Alex nudged me. “He means your rat.”
“Oh. Oh! Yes.” Now it was my turn to look stern, because, really, the Society had dropped the ball. “I don’t think killing civilians is going to keep you guys under the unenhanced radar.”
“Us,” Cornelius gently corrected me. “You’re a member now. You can expect your membership dues invoice to arrive shortly.”
Was he kidding? I looked into his sharp blue gaze and thought most likely not. “Do I get a handbook once I’m paid up?”
“Orientation classes.” Cornelius inclined his head. “But you were saying?”
I gave Alex a covert glance. Should I be jumping up and down that I’d been officially accepted? His bland expression implied “no.”
I focused my full attention on Cornelius. “A string of dead women is hardly staying under the radar. What’s being done? Are you investigating? Are you doing something to stop this murdering…rat?” I couldn’t come up with a better descriptor. I hated rats. More than snakes. My scalp prickled. Ugh.
“The dead women, as appalling as their deaths may be, are not problematic for the Society. They all appear to have died of natural causes. It is extremely unlikely the vampire virus will be detected in their systems. While such actions would be punished should the culprit be known, in this instance we do not have a perpetrator. Neither will we have one without extensive investigation; perhaps not even then. And our resources are thin.”
My blood started to boil. Liz hadn’t been a friend—but she didn’t deserve this. No one deserved this. And what about me? Apparently, I was chopped liver.
“Mind the eyes, dear. They’ve gone all red,” Cornelius chided me as if I’d cut my steak with a butter knife. Slightly embarrassing, but not appalling.
“They’ve gone all red because I’m angry. Livid.” A sharp pain in my shin brought my attention around to Alex. “Hey.”
“Listen.”
That was all he said, but it was enough to grab my attention and stem the tide of what would likely be regrettable words.
“Alex has brought it to my attention that you are not the only accidental transformation. There have been two others, and neither has ended well.” Cornelius’s voice was quite solemn. This, at least, he was taking seriously.
I shook my head. How could I have forgotten? “Dr. Dobrescu’s other patient. The one that got her hooked up with the Society.”
“Yes. That was a sad case. The other victim has just come to our attention. She wasn’t sound enough to seek the aid of a doctor—and she couldn’t stand the thirst. With no blood supply, no orientation to our world…it did not end well either.” Cornelius steepled his fingers, in much the same fashion as his detractor Wembley, oddly. “Dr. Dobrescu was most helpful. She’s an enlightened soul, the kind so rarely seen in our world.”
I didn’t remember thinking quite that highly of her. She’d tried to help me…I thought. But she’d also hustled me out the door, pulling me along behind her as fast as her clogged feet could move.
“But the risk of other accidental transformations is enough for you to find this…rat?” I couldn’t find another word. The truth was a terrible thing, and rat seemed safer. And still somewhat accurate.
“It is. You and Alex seem to work nicely together.” Cornelius nodded. “Yes, you’ll do. I’m prepared to offer you a small stipend.”
Alex laughed. “Just so you know, this is how it starts. We’ll give you this small stipend for a project. Oh, we have another. Here’s yet another. Suddenly, you’ve got full-time employment working for the Society.”
Cornelius shot Alex a disapproving look.
“Hey, it’s only fair. She hasn’t even gone through orientation yet and you’re practicing your shady recruitment tactics on her.”
I lifted a hand. “It’s fine.” Because, unless I was mistaken, I was being offered a paycheck to do exactly what I was already doing: finding the killer of my human-ness, pathetic and anxiety-ridden as it had been. “How much?”
“Five thousand.”
I glanced at Alex. No response.
“And?” I asked.
“Expenses.”
I glanced at Alex again. Again, no response.
“And?”
“With the project’s completion upon apprehension of the subject or at the end of a ten-day term, wherein reasonable efforts have been made to apprehend the subject, whichever occurs first.” I looked at Alex, but Cornelius cleared his throat in an attention-commanding way. “You needn’t ask Alex; that’s my best offer.”
“Accepted.”
Alex groaned.
“What? What did I miss?” My gaze flew between the two men.
“Pshaw. Nothing.” Giving Alex a steely look, Cornelius said, “I’ll pay her quickly. Good first impressions and such.”
Alex snorted. “I won’t hold my breath.” He turned to me and said, “Always include payment terms, otherwise Cornelius is likely to settle up at the end of the year.”
Since I wasn’t starving, that wasn’t a problem. But I nodded and made a mental note.
“And reasonable is a highly subjective term,” Alex said. “I suspect, if left to Cornelius’s definition, reasonable effort is equivalent to apprehending the subject.”
“Oh, now that’s hardly fair.” I scowled at Cornelius, but he just shrugged. “All right, then. How do we proceed?”
“Exactly as you started.” Cornelius rose from his chair. “I wish you success. It’s to no one’s advantage if this misbehavior continues.”
Misbehavior? But I bit my lip again.
I almost reached my hand out, but recalled that we hadn’t shaken hands on meeting. “It was nice to meet you.”
“Yes, good day.” Cornelius sat back down and turned to the computer screen on his desk.
Ale
x didn’t seem to mind. He stood up, stretched, then headed to the door at a casual pace. He held the door open for me but didn’t immediately follow me through.
I thought I heard Cornelius say, “You’re welcome,” but I could have been mistaken because the words were quite faint.
Alex shut Cornelius’s office door firmly behind him. “To give you a little perspective, when he says the doctor is enlightened, he means that no voodoo excisions of her memory were required. She agreed to work within the Society’s rules.”
My eyeballs felt like they were about ready to pop out of my skull.
“Yeah.” Alex inclined his head. “The new, modern Cornelius is one part bureaucrat, one part accountant, and two parts survivalist. And those are just the parts we see.”
“Fair warning—got it. And thanks.”
“There’s no real preparing for Cornelius, just hoping not to be blindsided.”
I nodded, though I suspected that Cornelius would get the best of me on more than one occasion in the future. “Where to, partner?”
Alex stopped and turned to look at me. “Not partners. Partner implies equality, and you, baby vamp, are nowhere close.”
“Where to, bossman?” Not that he was my boss—he wasn’t paying me. But I could play nice.
“My office. I’ve got that security footage you wanted to see, and I need to have a crack at pulling up Liz’s credit and debit card purchases for the last few days.”
Definitely not my boss—but very helpful. And on matters of timing and the police, I might defer. My mother would never forgive me if I was arrested.
Alex’s office, located close to the front of the warehouse and just around the corner from the retail store, was nothing like Cornelius’s. It was much larger, but not nearly so swanky. Where Cornelius’s office had an executive feel, Alex’s was more lived in. Used, comfortable furniture, a larger fridge—though not quite full size—a huge desk that had a worked-in feel. A calendar hung on the wall behind the desk, and sticky notes were tacked on the edge of his monitor.
I didn’t doubt that Cornelius worked in his office, but I knew Alex spent a lot of time in his.
My eyes swiveled back to the fridge. “Do you mind?” I asked, pointing to the fridge.
Alex paused a hair longer than I would have expected then said, “Help yourself.”
Did wizards need blood? He’d clearly been trying to remember what was inside. Or maybe something else disgusting, like… But my mind drew a blank. Next to blood, most stuff wasn’t that gross.
I opened the door to reveal a shocking truth: Alex was a health nut. Fresh fruit and veggies, a few varieties of juice, nuts, a small container of milk, granola, yogurt, kefir, a loaf of grainy wheat bread, and a small butcher’s package of deli meat.
“Keeping your bread in the fridge dries it out.” I grabbed his carrot juice. “Can I have this?”
No need for him to know I hadn’t tested out carrot juice yet. I’d just make a really quick run to the bathroom if it didn’t agree with me.
“No problem.” He’d booted up a laptop and had a file open. He turned the screen for me to see. “I’ve sliced out the relevant portion of the video from the original security footage and have it looped to play ten times. If you want more than that, just hit play again.”
Eying the laptop, I took a quick swig of the carrot juice, counted to fifteen, and took another swig. Probably good.
Alex gave me a weird look then handed me the laptop.
I planted myself on the futon. It was much more comfortable than it looked. I situated myself in the corner and asked, “Sleep here much?”
He glanced up from his desk. He was already reading through Liz’s bank statement. “Occasionally.” The man had some serious work ethic. Because I was starting to learn to read between the lines, and that definitely translated to a lot.
I pressed play—and there I was. All twelve sloppy, stumbling-drunk seconds of me. “Oh. This is terrible. I look wasted. I only had two white wine spritzers, I swear!”
“Your apparent inebriated state could be explained by a drug like Rohypnol. Remember, we talked about that.”
“All well and good for you to be calm. If my mother ever saw this…”
He was looking at me like I was a crazed woman—which was completely unfair. No one wanted their mother to seem them sloppy drunk.
“What? Do you not have a mother?”
“Not for a long time.”
Nuts. Open mouth and insert foot—except that was where my foot seemed to be living lately. “My condolences.”
“It was a long time ago.” He didn’t look distraught. Heck, he didn’t even look up from Liz’s financial records.
I’d missed the rest of the loops, so I gritted my teeth and pushed play. “Great. I will never be able to erase this. Please, please, please, never go viral.” And then plastered me stumbled and steadied herself—myself—on the passenger window of a car, and a tiny light bulb went off in my brain. “Reflective surfaces. Alex, reflective surfaces!”
He looked up, shook his head, and went back to his computer.
“No, this might be it. You know, catch the bad guy with a reflection.”
“That still means as little to me as it did the first time.”
“Do you not watch TV?”
“Do you see a TV in here?”
What an odd thing to say. Did the man not have a home? It was one thing to sleep in his office a lot—but surely he had a home?
“Whatever. Whenever the killer has hidden his face from the camera, the tech people always try to find reflective surfaces with different angles.” I was bouncing with excitement and had a near miss with Alex’s laptop, so I took a breath. In a calmer tone and without bouncing, I said, “Once they have an image from a reflective surface, they can enhance the video to ID the bad guy. Voila, case closed.”
“First, Sherlock, this video won’t enhance. Not without sophisticated software we don’t have. It’ll just get grainier if we blow up the picture.”
I tried not to let his naysaying dampen my spirits. Then again, he had more ammo. “And second?”
“Do you actually see any reflective surfaces?”
“I’m about to look, thank you very much. You’re welcome to help, if you like.” I patted the futon next to me then reset the video to play from the start of the loop.
The futon dipped when he accepted my invitation. I tipped the screen slightly to the right so he could see better.
The parking garage looked much darker on the video than it did in person. And the quality of the video wasn’t the greatest. But maybe…
“There.” Alex pointed at the screen. “When you wobble on your heels. Don’t growl at me—you’re wobbling. See, the lights from that car bounce off the window of that car.” He pointed again.
“I think you’re right.” I hunkered down closer to the screen with my finger on pause. There—I jabbed the pause key.
We both leaned in, staring at the screen.
“What do you see?” I asked.
“What do you see?”
“Seriously?” I leaned closer. “I see…a blob.”
“A not-tall blob.”
I tipped my head, hoping the perspective change would help. “A not-tall, not-short blob.” I groaned. “I really thought this would be more helpful.”
“We have a picture. A grainy, blobby picture, but that’s more than we had before.”
“Can your…” I didn’t know what to call them, because “spirit guides” had been a kind of joke when he’d used the term. Apparently me waggling my fingers in the air in a woo-woo fashion was sufficient.
“Spirits? Demons? Elementals?”
“Sure, if that’s what you use. Can they help?”
I could swear his eyes were crinkling up in the beginnings of a smile. “With digital video enhancement? No.”
How was I supposed to know that was a silly question? “Hey, I haven’t even had orientation yet.”
Alex snorted.
“You won’t learn about spirit entities in orientation.”
“Ah. What exactly do I learn in orientation?”
“Where all the bathrooms are. Whoa. Wait a second. You see that shading difference?”
I squinted, leaned forward, back…maybe… “He has a beard. Ha! Our guy has a beard.”
And who did I know that had a beard and had been with me on Tuesday?
“Martin. That scaly reptile.”
“Martin Shade?” Alex asked. “He’s not on the Society’s rolls. That’s all I know. I have a brief background workup on him, but I’ve only scanned it.”
“Where? I want to see it.”
Alex leaned back in the futon. “You have got to work on the eyes. Red is bad—glowing red will get you staked, dissected, or hung.”
“I thought staking wasn’t really a thing?”
“Better. When you’re distracted, it fades.” He retrieved a file from his desk and handed it to me.
“I’m allowed to be angry in the privacy of, well, of your office.” When he gave me a disapproving look, I stuck my tongue out at him. Juvenile? Yes. But oh so satisfying.
“You have to take this seriously. There can be serious consequences for behavior that exposes the Society.”
“Uh-huh.” I flipped through the first few pages, looking for the meaty parts. “Martin is such a reptile, but he’s a reptile with a lot of debt. A lot.”
“Drugs, alcohol, gambling, or student loans,” Alex said. “In my experience, those are the big ones.”
“Or he’s just bad with money.” I flipped quickly through to the end. “No student debt. Lots of maxed-out credit cards. But nowhere do I see in big red letters ‘psychotic vamp.’”
“Yeah, you wouldn’t, though, would you?” Alex took the file and looked through it. “Even though he’s not on the rolls, he could be unregistered. He’s only lived in Austin three years.”
“And yet it feels like so much longer.”
Alex set the file on his desk and then perched on the edge. “You really do not like this guy. What’s the deal?”
