Forever Young - Book 2

by Daniel Pierce

  We walked in, introduced ourselves to the receptionist, and asked to speak with someone about a wedding. That was our big, brilliant cover story. It made sense, since these people dealt in weddings, but I felt like an imposter

  The receptionist wrinkled her nose at us, then gave Daisy a watchful glare too, but our dog ignored her with nearly feline indifference. We waited for five minutes until a tall local woman came out from one of the offices. “Good afternoon. My name is Christie, and I’ll be taking care of you today. If you could follow me, we can talk about what your needs are and get to specifics.”

  We followed Christie into a glass-walled office with one brick wall and a window that looked out onto the street. “So why don’t you tell me a bit about yourselves and your, er, guard dog here?” Her voice was bright and cheery, but she looked down at Daisy with a gimlet eye.

  I studied Christie for a second. She looked perfectly normal. Well, she was more beautiful than the average woman, but she looked perfectly human. “I’m Jason, and this is my fiancée Kamila. We came here to Belize to get away from the bad weather back in Toronto, and now it’s time to start planning our wedding. Weather permitting, of course.”

  Kamila smiled and partially hid her face behind a curtain of hair. “Daisy is my emotional support animal. She comes with me everywhere and helps me to deal with all of the stress and strain of strangers and crowds.” She kept her voice soft. “She’ll be in the wedding. I could never get up in front of so many people without having her to help me.”

  “I see.” Christie relaxed after hearing Daisy had some kind of official occupation. “Well, it’s excellent that you have her, then. So you’ve been here a while?”

  “A few months, yeah. We’ve mostly just been out exploring, hiking. We just came back from a trek out into the jungle today. We couldn’t wait anymore. We just want to get the wedding done, you know?” I put on my best dopey, love-sick expression and gazed at Kamila. “I don’t want to go a minute longer than I have to. I want to make Kami my bride just as soon as our families can be brought down from Toronto.”

  “Well, okay. We have plenty of experience with that.” She grabbed a pen from her desk. “Tell me, what kind of budget are we looking at?”

  I noticed a bracelet she was wearing. Kamila noticed it too. “Oh my God, that’s an amazing bracelet. Where did you get it? I’d love to be able to get something like it for my bridesmaids.” She fluttered her eyes at Christie, somehow managing to not come off like a complete flake.

  Christie beamed at her. “Why, thank you. It’s an heirloom. It belonged to my aunt, but if you go to Nestor’s on High Street, they have some incredible jewelry, all in pure silver. I’m positive you’ll find exactly what you need there. So, your budget?”

  Kamila made up a number, and the two of them discussed venues, menus, and ambiance. Just as I had during my first wedding, I tuned it out, though I did dial back in when I heard the words cake and chocolate. Unlike my first wedding, this one would serve a very different purpose, beginning with the facts before me.

  If Christie was wearing a silver heirloom bracelet and recommending a silver jewelry specialist to people, she was not a vampire. She probably didn’t associate with vampires or work for them. Vampires didn’t tend to spend time around people who ran around with silver stuck to their persons, as it was like keeping a family of rattlesnakes in your shower. It didn’t work out for either party.

  Could she be Ferin? I didn’t have any indication that she was. Then again, we didn’t exactly go screaming it to the world, until something happened that caused our powers to shine.

  We spoke for a while, blathering on about the business of getting married. Outside, I could see the shadows lengthening. Nightfall was coming. Christie saw my glance and checked the time. “I’m sorry to do this—” She looked abashed, then gave us her best professional smile. “I hate to rush you out the door, but I’m afraid I have to pick my niece up from her school, and I can’t be late. Here, let me give you my card, and perhaps we can pick this up tomorrow?”

  “That’s a wonderful idea.” Kamila beamed and shook Christie’s hand. Christie escorted us to the front door, and we went to the corner to meet up with Tess.

  Tess joined up about a minute or so later. She had a bit of dust on her knees, but otherwise looked perfectly normal. “Did you find anything?” I asked her, leaning in.

  She took a step back. “Take a chill pill, there. I get you’re excited to get some news, but we’re not going to solve the mystery just by going and talking to the wedding planner, okay?” She patted me on the shoulder. “So I explored the building. There aren’t any other companies in the space, even though they don’t have a whole lot of personnel to take up so much real estate. Maybe they’re planning to expand. I don’t know.

  “I found some storage areas and the usual things used for event rentals. You know what I mean—I’m talking china, flatware, drinkware, that kind of thing. And some of the silverware was actual silver. I checked.” She squirmed a little. “That’s not sinister. That’s the opposite of sinister. That has me thinking vampire hunters, not vampires.”

  “Are those a thing?” I turned to Kamila. “It doesn’t sound real.”

  “I’ve never met one, but I can see where a human might find it appealing.” Kamila shrugged. “Anything else, Tess?”

  “Anyway, there were some storage areas that were locked up tighter than others. I don’t know why. They weren’t labeled, and I had to hide before I could pick all of the locks cleanly. I didn’t want to leave any trace that I’d been there, you know?” Tess bit her lip. “I could have done it faster if I’d just smashed my way in.”

  “No, that would have been too obvious and drawn too much attention. I think you handled it perfectly.” I ran my hand through my hair. “This is bullshit. We know Morning Star is somehow connected to the vampires and to Zarya, but we don’t know exactly how yet.”

  Kamila licked her lips. “Maybe the folks from Morning Star had contact with Zarya in some way?”

  Tess gave her a funny look. “You know your friend better than I do, but isn’t she a recluse? She lives on an island with a reputation for killing people, that isn’t on any map, and is surrounded by reefs and sandbars. Once you make it onto that island, her house is surrounded by a jungle filled with poisonous snakes and other new and interesting ways to die. Why would Zarya want to have contact with a party planner?”

  “She wouldn’t.” Kamila sighed, and then she perked up again. “She wouldn’t, but what if they came to her first? There’s no way Christie wasn’t worried about vampires. You saw her, Jason. There was the silver bracelet. There was the way she encouraged us to go to the silversmith’s for jewelry. And there was the way she gave us the bum’s rush out of there when she saw the sun was setting.”

  “True.” I nodded. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean she knew there was a witch, or a Ferin, or both, out on that island.”

  “You knew?” she gasped.

  “I figured it out, Kamila. Not the point.” I looked up. Christie was just stepping out of the office now, silver gleaming brightly at her wrist. “Here, there’s an easy way to solve that.”

  I put on the avatar of Jason the Expat again, the besotted fiancé, and jogged up to Christie. She jumped a little. I’d startled her. If I wasn’t mistaken, she wasn’t thrilled about being interrupted in her path to safety while it was getting dark.

  “Hi, Jason. How can I help you?”

  “I forgot to mention something. I’m sorry, I know you need might work on, you know, commission and all that stuff. I just—I wanted to make sure you got the credit, you know? My friend Zarya is the one who told me to come in. She said to ask for you.”

  She blinked in confusion. She didn’t call me out on the obvious lie, but I didn’t see any deception in her either. “I don’t think I know any Zarya. It’s a beautiful name, though. Is she Russian? Polish?”

  “Canadian, I’m afraid. She sure remembers you. Sang your praise
s up and down.” I smiled goofily.

  “Well, you know what? It’s been a long day. I’m lucky I remember my own name right now. Please tell your friend I said hello, and it was lovely working with her. If you’ll excuse me, I really can’t be late.” She gave me another big smile and jogged off toward her car, heels clattering on the concrete sidewalk.

  I returned to my friends. “She’s never heard of Zarya. I guess we’re back to square one.”

  “I guess.” Kamila sighed and slumped her shoulders. “Let’s find a hotel. If nothing else, we can clean up and settle in. We’ll find a place to hang out and plan our next move. It’s a setback, but we’re used to those. We’ll come up with a plan of attack and get to work. Right?”

  Tess and I nodded, and we all followed her to go find a hotel. Something about Morning Star still made my skin crawl, and it wasn’t just the Satanic name. We would find an answer, but first, we needed to find Zarya.

  19

  Tess found a hotel that marketed to our tourist personas. The decor was hip, the prices were low, and every room had a TV that doubled as a web terminal. I cracked my knuckles and hunched over the Bluetooth keyboard, ready to start researching.

  The girls were less than supportive. “What exactly are you going to do with that, surf for porn?” Tess asked. Her tone hovered between humor and derision.

  Kamila snorted. “You don’t need porn. You have us.”

  Daisy huffed out a mighty sigh and turned her back as I began to type. “I’m not searching for porn, you pervs. I’m looking to see what else I can find out about that company. Something about it is off. I know it, and so do you.”

  “Dude. There wasn’t anything there.” Tess nudged me and took the keyboard away. “Come on. Let’s look for something a little livelier than digging into a company’s financial records.”

  Kamila smirked. “She’s probably right, Jason. Zarya might have been a recluse, but if she lived only an hour away from this city, that means there was an underworld. We should find it.”

  “And where we can find an underworld, we’ll find one of two things.” Tess typed as she spoke. “We’ll find either vampires or Ferin. Either one is fine by me. The vampires will lead us to Zarya. The Ferin might have some clues that will lead us to Zarya, or else they’ll be willing to help us kill some vampires. Either way, I see black ash in our future and hopefully an ally saved.”

  The screen blinked. Your search for “night life belize city” turned up 584 results. Would you like to narrow your search results?

  Tess scanned through the options. We saw a handful of places that were the usual tourist traps. I saw one place that appropriated the Mayan theme to make people do “pyramids of tequila shots!!!!!” and another that claimed to be a real-life pirate bar, which Kamila wanted to torch on general principles.

  Tess was the one who found it. “Get your Goth on at Dark Republic,” she read aloud. “This looks promising.” She clicked on the link.

  I curled my lip and turned away. “People wanting to play vampire. Just what we need.” My ex, Linda, had gone through a faux Goth phase in college. At the time, I just found it hot, but now it was tedious. Posers of any stripe seemed sad and desperate, given the actual monsters living right under their noses.

  “Hey, let people feel free to let their inner dark whatsits out.” Kamila kissed the top of my head, then rested there, her breasts pressed against me with a delicious heft. It was familiar and intimate. “It gives us a place to go and find what we’re looking for, right? But look at that decor. What does it look like to you?”

  I made myself turn around and look at the photos. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. It looks like that dump, the hive where the vampires were hiding out. Even the graffiti on the wall is the same.”

  “Right?” She wrapped her arms around my shoulder and gave me a little squeeze. “Now think about that for a minute. That can’t be a coincidence. If we go check this place out, we’ll almost certainly find something that relates back to the vampires. It’ll bring us closer to Zarya. I have an obligation to help Zarya, if I can, and that means rubbing shoulders with club rats. Sometimes, you’ve gotta do the dirty work. Like tolerating loud music and well liquor at triple the price. You know you wanna.” She leered at me and mimed drinking something. In spite of myself, I laughed.

  “I hate the idea, but yeah, you’re right. I can’t think of a better way to get what we need. I’m telling you right now, though, your good humor aside, this feels shitty. And dangerous.”

  “You’ve always got a bad feeling.” Tess grinned and bolted for the shower. “Take an antacid!” she shouted as she disappeared.

  “You’re right to be suspicious, but yeah, it is where we need to be.” She stripped her clothes off. “I’ll join her. It’ll save time.”

  Now it was my turn to leer. “Can I watch?”

  She laughed and pretended to swat me. “Pervert.” She headed off toward the bathroom, red hair swinging as she walked, and I returned to my web browsing.

  The problem with my research was that I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. I knew the building was old, an old counting house, in fact. I couldn’t find any information about previous deed transfers, which meant it had been owned by the same person or people since the founding of Belize City. That raised a lot of red flags as far as I was concerned. If I were writing the policy, not only would I refuse to insure it, but I’d refer it for a fraud investigation. My inner actuary came out, and I suddenly felt the need to wear pleated slacks and a button-down shirt.

  The upper floors hadn’t ever been rented, at least not that I could find any record of. It was possible that Belize was just shoddy about record keeping, but that didn’t make sense. Belize had been a British colony for a long time, and former British colonies tended to be fairly uptight about record keeping. They looked at it as a point of pride, in fact. The British Empire wasn’t just built on their navy; it was driven by the pen and forms, preferably in triplicate.

  I turned my attention to Morning Star itself. The company had been in existence for about ten years. According to their website, they’d been founded in response to a spate of crime in the city, when things had seemed particularly bleak. They wanted the company to serve as a reminder that things would get better someday, bright like the morning star.

  Bullllllshiiiiit. The company’s founder had moved to Belize from London some five years before, only to lose her husband in a boating accident.

  A little east-southeast of the mainland.

  A tripwire in my mind went off at the location. I didn’t know if Zarya would kill to keep her location a secret, but then again, I didn’t know her at all.

  The girls emerged from the shower, truly clean for the first time in a good while. They got dressed right away, and I looked them over. “You’re not getting into a Goth club dressed like that.”

  Tess rolled her eyes. “You don’t say. Kamila and I are going shopping. You’re going to stay here and de-stink yourself.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Why bother to de-stink myself if I’m just going into a nightclub that reeks of clove cigarettes and broken hearts?”

  “Because you’re going to sleep in a bed with the three of us.” Kamila gestured to herself, Tess, and Daisy. Daisy let her tongue loll out of her mouth. “Go on. We’ll get you something to wear. Don’t worry.”

  “Can’t I just wear my leathers?” I complained.

  “Oh, there will be leather.” Tess swatted my ass playfully on the way out, and I grinned in spite of my worries. Then I headed into the shower.

  It felt good to wash up for real. I hadn’t been able to take a decent shower since Cuba, and even that one had left a little to be desired, thanks to sanctions. I had all the hot water I could want here, and the girls had left me plenty of soap and shampoo. I began a methodical scrub from head to toe as if I had a date. In a way, I did, and the simple act of reclamation lifted my spirits with each scalding pulse of the shower.

  I couldn’t stop thinking abou
t Morning Star. Morning Star’s building must be owned by vampires. If it wasn’t, I’d eat my own shoes. The owner of the company itself must be linked to vampires, and at the very least, I suspected she had reason to want Zarya taken care of. And everything we’d found about the vamps chasing us around led us back to Morning Star, in a circle of hints and allegations that left our current course as the only logical conclusion. To find out, we had to go.

  I got out of the shower and dried myself, thinking all along but using my power in an absent way to wash and then dry our clothes. It was a curious mix of heat, water, and steam, rolling the clothes around in a tumult of magical energy.

  “Finally. A reason to be Ferin.” I nodded with satisfaction at the array of clothes, spreading them over towel bars and the shower itself.

  Tess and Kamila returned, loaded down with shopping bags. I raised an eyebrow. “You do realize we’ve got to carry all of that to wherever it is we go next,” I reminded them.

  “We know,” Kamila told me with a little smile. One of the things she’d brought back was food for Daisy, who appreciated the donation greatly. “Some things we just couldn’t resist, and some things were necessities.”

  Tess was already dumping things from the bag onto the bed. She pulled out a black lace body suit I assumed was intended to be lingerie. “Give him the pants,” she urged. “Come on, come on, give him the pants!”

  Kamila grabbed two items from the pile. One was a floor-length leather dress that laced up the sides. The other was a pair of leather trousers. I frowned.

  “Those are at least two sizes too small.” I looked back up at Kamila. “I’ll just wear the leather pants I wear for riding.”

  “Just try them on,” she urged.

  I went to grab some underwear.

  “Er, no.” Tess hid her mouth with one hand. I deeply suspected she was hiding laughter. “Just the pants, big guy. You’re going commando.”

  “If my boys chafe, I’m holding you personally responsible,” I told her while pulling the pants on.