Chapter 11
My eyes were foggy, and I kept blinking to clear my vision. Slowly the room around me came into focus, and I found myself staring at my own ceiling. Soft morning light was filtering into the bedroom.
I sat up, grabbed my phone from where it lay face down on the nightstand, and checked it. It was eight thirty on Friday morning. I hadn’t lost too much time.
Then a million questions crashed down on me. How had I gotten home? What had happened after the fight last night?
I groaned, the weight of humiliation dragging me down like a weight around my ankles. Could I even call what had happened a fight? Where had the rest of the night gone? What had I done in the black void that stretched from then until now?
I couldn’t remember anything. The last thing I remembered was those eyes, black pools of emptiness that drew me in. The warmth came back, the numb feeling that I had been craving for years. The feeling I had never been able to find with any of my kills.
I shook my head. I had to snap out of it. That woman was going to steal everything from me. Everything that made me, me. I knew it like a solid truth inside me, cementing my resolve in place.
When I threw back the covers and swung my legs out, I noticed I was still wearing my leathers. The graze on my leg smarted, and I touched my thigh gingerly. Hadn’t I gotten undressed? I felt like I’d been stuck in a dream. I got up, unbuckled my thigh sheath and climbed out of the torn pants. The leather clung to my wounds, and peeling it off was like removing a Band-Aid. Once they were off, I threw them toward the wastebasket. Then I stripped off the rest of my clothes as well.
I slathered antiseptic cream on the wound, which burned an angry red all the way down. It hurt like hell, and I could feel my pulse throbbing down the length of my leg. The last thing I wanted was an infection the size of half my body. At least being half-vampire meant I would heal up in half the time.
When I’d finished, I took an inventory of my stuff. All my guns were in the gun safe, which was normal. But my thigh sheath had still been on my leg. Strange. I walked over to the bed and discovered that my Glock was missing. When I searched through the room, I found it on the dressing table. Definitely not where it should have been.
In the bathroom, I checked myself out in the mirror. I ran my hands down my face, then opened the tap. I cupped my hands under the stream, intending to splash some cold water onto my face. Then I looked at myself in the mirror again.
My old bruises were completely gone. The woman had scratched me hard on the cheek. I remembered how it had stung, the slick blood running down my face, but when I inspected my skin, there wasn’t a mark. I tried to count how many hours it had been. Seven? Eight? I could easily heal up in that time, but this felt quicker than normal. Either I was showing more of my vampire side, which scared me, or something else was wrong – I’d missed more time or something. That scared me too, so I decided to believe the former.
Still, it all felt wrong. Very wrong.
I fetched my knife in its sheath from the bedroom and hung it in the shower. I wasn’t going to do anything without protection anymore, until I could figure out what the hell was going on. The hot water stung down my leg and I gritted my teeth, trying to keep soap out of the wound.
By the time I was finished showering, two things were playing in my mind. One: she was just toying with me now, like a cat playing with a mouse. But the real trouble would come. She wouldn’t let me live. If I was getting beaten up already, how would I protect myself when things got serious?
And two: if I had gotten home by myself, that would have been fine, but there were too many things that pointed to someone else trying to fake my routine. That meant that someone knew me well enough to know what I did and where I lived. And if that was the case, I was in very, very deep trouble.
The phone rang, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. When I picked it up, I didn’t recognize the number.
“Hello?” My voice was thin, unsure. I hated the way I sounded.
“It’s Jennifer,” that familiar, feminine voice said.
I could feel every fiber in my body slowly begin to relax. I rubbed my temple with my free hand.
“I was just wondering if you’ve managed to find anything yet,” Jennifer said.
Yes, I found your boyfriend. He was a vampire, and I really wanted to see him again.
“Actually, I was hoping we could meet in person again. There are a couple of things I’d like to talk about.”
“We can talk now,” she suggested.
“I don’t think this is the kind of thing we want to talk about on the phone.”
She gasped at the other end of the line, then dropped her voice. “Do you think it’s being tapped?”
This wasn’t a spy novel. Blood, betrayal, death – that was a part of my daily life. But my phone being tapped didn’t seem likely. I thought back to Joel, and his pit being trashed. The level of security on Connor’s online information. I shook it off.
“Nothing like that. I just want to meet up. When’s good for you?”
“Saturday afternoon,” she said after a moment. “We can meet at my house.”
I hesitated for a second, then agreed. If it wasn’t her home, it would be mine. I hated being out in public, and I wasn’t willing to let her into my home again unless I didn’t have a choice.
“I’ll be there at three,” I said. “Send me your address.”
“Will you let me know if you find anything in the meantime?”
“I will,” I lied.
“The truth is, I’m starting to lose hope,” she said.
A pang of guilt shot through my chest. I was working myself into a corner, and fast. At the beginning of the week, my life had been regular, ordinary. Shoot to kill, survive to see another night, take care of Aspen. Simple. Now I didn’t know which side was up anymore. My life had become a Rubik’s Cube I couldn’t solve.
After Jennifer had hung up, I dialed the office. Boy, was Ruben going to be pissed. Not only had I managed to ignore his orders to find Connor, but I had also lost an entire night.
“What?” he barked into the phone when he picked up.
“I wanted to explain last night,” I replied.
This wasn’t going to be easy. I expected him to swear up one side of me and down the other.
“What about last night?” he asked. “You have more information you want to share with me?”
“More?”
“Than last night.”
I hesitated. “Did I phone in last night?”
Ruben snorted. “You told me you’d found a lead and you were tracing him. Not your best effort, but it’s better than nothing. What’s going on?”
Someone was playing with me. Nothing made sense, and most of all, Ruben wasn’t angry with me. Something was definitely off.
“I just called to check what time you needed me in tonight,” I said, recovering. I didn’t want him to find out something was wrong. I needed this job more than I needed the money.
“Don’t come in tonight. Something urgent came up, and I’m not going to be in the office. I gave Carl a night off too.”
I’d completely forgotten about my so-called colleague. It usually felt like I was working the field alone. I hardly ran into the guy. Why hadn’t Ruben assigned him to Connor’s case, if he thought I was making such a mess of it? Also, having a night off was a rarity.
“I’ll be in touch,” Ruben said before I could ask, and hung up the phone.
A night off. I couldn’t remember the last time that had happened. It sounded good, until I started wondering what I would do with my time. What I would do for a release instead.
I put more antiseptic cream on my wound, then bandaged my leg up. It restricted my movements, which I hated, but with some luck the wound would be healed soon. I dressed in jeans and a blouse, and left my hair loose for a change.
I had a couple of errands to run. I’d run out of leather clothes, and I wasn’t going to do the dirty in
jeans. It just wasn’t that easy to get blood out of regular fabric. I also needed a quote on my paint job, I had to train with Sensei, and I needed to get to a place where I could do some research about the cat lady whose name I still didn’t know.
I was getting tired of thinking of her as my attacker. I would have much preferred to think of her as my victim, but for that I’d need a leg up on what she was capable of.
The rest of Friday was ridiculous. I went home with my bike booked in for a paint job and new leathers in plastic bags – but I’d found absolutely nothing anywhere on women who had abilities like Ms. White Hair. I was miserable and tired, so instead of heading out, I took two sleeping pills and crawled under the covers.
Saturday morning, my cell phone pulled me out of a coma-like sleep with a shrill ring that made me want to throw it through the window. Instead, I answered. No one had ever said I had a lack of self-control.
“What is it?”
“This is Sonya,” her dull voice came over the phone.
I realized she’d never phoned me before. I was usually in the office at sundown. If anything, she sounded even more boring over the phone than in person. I wondered if she had a life outside the office.
“You work on weekends? You’re phoning me during the day.” I imagined her in a room with metal shutters and black curtains.
She ignored my question. “Ruben has a meeting set up that you need to attend.”
“You may work weekends, but I don’t.”
“You had the night off,” she pointed out. Of course. Why would I think I’d get paid leave? “He wants you to meet with Ms. Clemens today at noon.”
“Ms. Clemens the reporter?” The name at the bottom of the article Joel had shown me.
“That’s the one.”
“It’s daytime,” I said. Ruben and I had agreed on no work during, even though we both knew that I could operate during the day. I just didn’t want to.
“You’ll make a plan. Meet Ruben at Fiasco just before noon.” That said, she hung up.
I sighed and let the phone slide down onto the pillow. Great. If I’d known I was going to trade my weekend for a Friday night off, I would have refused and gone out anyway.
I didn’t know how I was going to get hold of Connor to cancel with him. He’d just have to suck it. Work came before vampires. Even though work was vampires.
I rolled out of bed and crawled into the shower, swearing when the hot water stung enough to remind me about my leg. The edges of the wound were healed with new pink skin, but the graze was still quite big, and it hurt. Once the stinging had ebbed, the hot water woke my body up slowly, and by the time I was finished I felt human again.
I texted Aspen. I didn’t like skipping days, but I would see her tomorrow.
Then I stood in front of my closet with a towel wrapped around my body, looking for something appropriate to wear. I wasn’t going to meet the snooping reporter in my killing clothes. Nothing screamed trouble more than a woman like me wearing guns and leathers. I settled on jeans that could stretch to allow for the bandage I had wrapped around my leg, a wine-red blouse that made my hair color intense, and black sandals. The shoes were still in the original shoebox Aspen had given them to me in, three birthdays ago.
I applied makeup and brushed my hair. I even went to the effort of putting on earrings. When I studied the final result in the mirror, I didn’t look like myself at all. I looked like a businesswoman. A civilian. Someone who could have a completely different life. Unfortunately, changing what I looked like didn’t change who I was.
Fiasco was a coffee shop in the shopping center across from the mall. It was the place everyone went to for early morning business meetings, because it opened at six, and it offered the paper with a coffee and a bagel as its morning special.
When I arrived, Ruben was already sitting at a table. He was wearing suit pants and a collared shirt with a tie. The shirt was ironed and clean, and he’d run a comb through his hair. I glanced down to see shiny black shoes instead of slippers.
“You clean up nicely. You look human for a change,” Ruben said when I sat down.
“I can say the same for you,” I responded coolly.
He snorted. “I was scared you might arrive in your leathers.”
“What kind of an accountant would I be if I wore leathers?”
“That’s my girl,” Ruben said, smiling.
I wanted to tell him how much I wasn’t his girl, but before I could, another woman arrived at our table. She introduced herself as Celia Clemens, journalist for the Westham Gazette. I didn’t know why she bothered with all of that. There was only one newspaper in town. No competitors? Tough life.
I looked at her carefully. She had mouse-brown hair pulled back into a low bun and glasses with big frames that covered half of her face. She had sharp features, almost pixie-like. She was wearing a green dress suit that did nothing for her skin tone, and her eyes were a dark brown. Her clothes dated from a time period that suggested she was in her forties, but her smooth skin and lack of smile wrinkles told me otherwise. She couldn’t have been much older than thirty. There was something familiar about her. Something I couldn’t put my finger on.
“I appreciate you making the time to meet with me,” she said to Ruben in a sweet voice. Her words lilted, and again there was something familiar about them. Almost like there was a veil between me and her, and if I could just remove it I would know I’d seen her before, and where.
“Of course, Ms. Clemens,” Ruben answered, equally charming.
“Celia, please,” she said, and took a small notepad out of her briefcase. “I just have a couple of questions for you.” She never made eye contact with me. I didn’t know if I should feel insulted or flattered.
“Go on,” Ruben said, and Celia started her questioning.
It was standard stuff. What kind of business Ruben ran, how long he’d been doing it, how many employees he had, that sort of thing. I had no idea why she was bothering.
“Word has it that you operate at night, as well,” Celia said, and Ruben’s face closed.
“We have a team that works overtime pretty often,” he said. His voice was guarded. “It’s common knowledge that we employ vampires.”
“You are pro-vampire, then, I assume?”
Ruben was anything but pro-vampire.
“I do what’s necessary to keep my company active in the right circles. There are laws about everything these days, and who am I to keep someone out of business just because they’re…” He looked at me. “Different.”
I could feel the tension building like an approaching storm. Ruben’s face was expressionless, but I could smell his panic. Celia wasn’t throwing off any kind of emotion at all, and that had me on alert. People always threw off some kind of scent that clued me in to their emotions. Excitement, fear, sadness – even something as simple as interest had a smell and a feel to it. Celia should have been giving off at least that. And she wasn’t.
“There are rumors that you’re the person to come to when someone has a problem,” she said.
“We’ve always helped people with their finances. Our main goal is to help our clients make ends meet.” That would have been relatively smooth if he hadn’t looked so panicked.
“Now, Mr. Cross, we both know that wasn’t what I was talking about.”
“Do we?” he answered.
Good for Ruben. He was starting to play this game the right way.
“And what do you do?”
She suddenly turned to me, and her eyes sent a shock through my body that I couldn’t place, but it wasn’t altogether unfamiliar. It made my fingertips tingle, and my legs felt warm. This was not natural, coming from a human.
“I’m an accountant with Cross Ledger,” I answered without missing a beat.
Ruben might have been panicking, but I was ready for her. Ms. Clemens was trying to hide who she really was. I did it all the time; I recognized the signs. The only question now was, w
ho was she really?
Celia had a glint in her eye. She sat back in her chair like she didn’t have a care in the world, one leg crossed over the other. Her skirt rode up a little, and on the skin just above her knee was a burn mark. A couple of days old, a scar now. It wasn’t red and burning anymore.
I knew right away that that burn was out of place. Household accidents didn’t leave a scar like that. It was about three inches long and slightly off-kilter.
“Ms. Clemens,” I said, interrupting her questioning.
Ruben looked relieved, but she was annoyed. She wanted to be the one in control of this conversation. Too bad. When I looked into her eyes, I noticed that the black of her pupils had grown to cover her irises. The realization knocked me off-balance, and I fought to maintain composure.
“That looks like a painful burn mark on your leg,” I said.
She looked down at her leg and tugged her skirt down to hide it. “Cooking accident,” she said. “I’m clumsy in the kitchen.”
Sure. Straight burn marks, the length of a blade. What had she been doing, kitchen gymnastics?
Her eyes settled on mine again, and her words suddenly seemed believable. Kitchen accidents happen all the time. Burns are common in the kitchen.
Stop it! my mind shouted at her, and I forced her out of there.
I’d nailed her. There was only one person I’d run into who could play mind games like that.
“I’ll bet you are,” I said.
My voice was calm, but the atmosphere around us had changed. It was thick now, laced with warning and threat. I suddenly smelled her emotions: a powerful stench like flowers, the perfume-like smell that came after they’d been parched. I’d smelled that scent before.
“Where was I?” she asked Ruben, but she was still looking at me.
“You were talking about hidden identities and double lives,” I said without missing a beat.
That wasn’t what she’d been talking about at all. I was calling her out. Ruben looked from me to Celia and back. He was starting to realize he’d missed something.
I couldn’t be sure this was her. After all, this woman had brown hair, and the other woman had had white hair. But I had started running into creatures that could disguise themselves, and the only time I would believe what I was seeing was never.
“I think that’s enough for today,” she said. Her voice was confident. I didn’t think she was leaving because she’d been exposed. Her reaction wasn’t panicked. She was leaving because she’d found what she was looking for.
Me.
“Thank you for coming,” Ruben said, but Celia stood up and walked away just as the waitress arrived.
“Can I take your order?” the waitress asked with a bright smile.
Ruben shook his head and waved her away. “What was that all about?”
“A hundred bucks says Celia Clemens is only an alias,” I said as we both watched her walk away. “Maybe not the name, but the job, definitely.” An alias, or she had a damn good cover. Better than mine, if she could throw her name around in public. “You’d better get some sort of insurance, Ruben. I have a feeling you’re not going to last very long.”
“I’ll get right on it,” he said.
He was taking my word for it. That was a first. Maybe he’d realized somewhere along the line that he was in over his head, and that I knew more about this ugly world than he did.
“I need to go,” I said to Ruben.
“I want you in the office at midnight,” he said when I turned to leave.
“Why?”
Midnight was the witching hour. That was when supernatural creatures were most alive, the time I either wanted to be out with my guns, or locked up safely at home.
“My clients want answers about why the job isn’t done yet, and I’m not going to make excuses for you again. I’m not facing them alone. You can come in and deal with them with me.”
“In the middle of the night?”
“It’s the only time slot they have available.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but instead I closed it again and nodded. I would be there. Why not? I needed some action, and maybe if I knew why these clients wanted Connor dead, it would give me enough motivation to push my pathetic attraction aside and finish the job.
“I’ll be there,” I said.
A midnight meeting over the weekend sounded like a lot of fun… not. I was sure I’d run into some creatures that didn’t show their faces during the day, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to. But if Ruben was involved, I had to be there. He was just a human, and even though I strongly disliked him, this job was my responsibility. His increasing anxiety over the kill had me on guard, too. Ruben didn’t ordinarily get upset when I didn’t make a kill right away.
First, though, I had to get to Jennifer. She’d texted me her address, and I had half an hour to get to her.
I took the bus, and it dropped me off halfway up Westham Hills. Jennifer lived on Tambuca Crescent, one street up from Caldwell. I was starting to get to know this area. When I reached number 21, I pushed the button on the intercom and a woman with an accent answered.
“Adele Griffin for Jennifer Lawson, please,” I said.
The intercom clicked and the massive gates swung open, revealing a curling driveway that led up to a Tuscan style house with arches over the balconies and a lot of hanging plants.
The door opened, and a dark-skinned woman wearing a maid’s outfit answered the door. I’d half-expected a butler.
“Please follow me,” she said, and took me to a formal sitting room just off the entrance hall. It was mostly white, with splashes of mahogany and red here and there. She pointed me toward a chair. “Ms. Lawson will be with you shortly.”
When Jennifer arrived, she was wearing a flowing green dress the color of her eyes. She glided to the armchair opposite mine. Her hair was impossibly straight, and her makeup was flawless. If this was how she dressed on a Saturday, I wondered how she dressed for a big event.
“Thank you for taking the time to meet with me,” she said as the maid brought in a tray with a teapot and cups sitting upside down on their saucers. They were accompanied by a glass bowl filled with sugar cookies. “You look nice.”
“Business meeting,” I said, wishing I didn’t look like a mannequin in a window display.
Jennifer turned the cups over and poured the tea. I took a cookie and nibbled on it. I felt out of place here, surrounded by things that had never mattered to me.
“You lied to me,” I said, getting right down to business.
Jennifer’s hands trembled slightly, but other than that she was composed and her voice was steady when she answered me. “What do you mean?”
“You didn’t tell me about the trafficking. The fact that Connor was wanted by the police.”
Her green eyes were bright, like emeralds. “You found out.”
“Did you think this was something you could keep secret from me?” I asked.
“I just thought, when I first found out you didn’t know, that I could ask you to do this for me and you wouldn’t be influenced by what people were saying about him.”
“And about you,” I said. Because that was what it was really about.
She didn’t answer. Her lips were pursed and slightly pouted, and she was paying particular attention to the second cup of tea she had poured, which she offered to me. I took it to be polite. I hated tea.
“You’re going to have to be honest with me. You came to me because of Connor, saying you needed me to find him. But you knew he wasn’t human anymore, didn’t you?”
She seemed to understand that I would know if she was lying. She couldn’t know that I could actually smell a lie, but honesty was a smart move.
“I’ve been to hell and back since I took this job, and I’m not going to get beaten up for nothing,” I said.
“She found you, then?” Jennifer asked.
The cat lady. Celia.
“Are you invo
lved with this?” I asked.
Direct was usually the best way to go. When you embroider a picture around the facts, dance around the truth, the chances are that the person you’re talking to will do the same. A straightforward question is difficult to avoid without being obvious.
“I’m not,” she said. “I don’t condone things like that.”
“But you don’t condone vampirism, either,” I said. That was a guess, but seemed to be an accurate one. Her face turned to stone, and when she looked at me, a lot of the color had drained from her skin. “Why did you come to me?” I asked.
“I hoped that if you found Connor before they did—”
“You knew what it would mean for me to get into this, and you still sent me in there without the facts. That’s like going into battle unarmed, Jennifer. Do you have any idea what that’s like?”
She took a sip of her tea, looking at me with big green eyes over the edge of the cup. She shuddered.
“I needed him to stay alive. I needed them not to be able to find him. I can’t love a vampire, Adele. Surely you of all people can understand?”
A million different emotions ran through me. Yes, I could understand. I killed vampires. My mother had loved one, and look where that had ended up. I’d met Connor, and everything about him, even in his vampire state, had drawn me to him. He was irresistible. I could love that vampire.
“Did you know about the trafficking before Connor did?” I asked. She nodded slowly. “They asked me to help them, and to keep it a secret so he wouldn’t find out. They needed his money.”
“And you agreed?”
She sighed. “I don’t know how to make this sound like it’s not wrong. I was only looking out for his best interests. We were going to get married. I couldn’t let a scandal like that ruin everything.”
“Because you love him so much?”
Her eyes started to fill with tears. I fought the urge to roll my own eyes. I was being the epitome of politeness.
“Can’t you understand that?” she asked.
“Actually I can’t, no,” I said. I couldn’t imagine loving someone so much that something like trafficking couldn’t ruin it. I often argued that I didn’t have any morals. Maybe I was wrong. “Besides, I think you did it for the money.”
“They weren’t paying me for my silence!” she said, her cheeks ashen.
I shook my head. I was going out on a limb here, but her reactions guided me. “I’m not talking about their money. I’m talking about his.”
She gasped, and the air around us turned cold. Not the supernatural kind of cold, but the kind that comes from a person realizing she’s talked herself into a corner and there’s no way to get out of it again.
“I can’t lose it all. I won’t go back to the hole I was in when my ex-husband left me.”
Ex? This whole thing had suddenly turned into a saga I didn’t want to be involved in.
“Look,” I said. “I don’t want to hear from you again. You lied to me, and you got me into a mess where if I don’t do something soon, I have a feeling people are going to die. You’d better hope to god that doesn’t include me, because you signed off on my death sentence by not letting me know what this was really about.”
The tears that had been sitting on the rims of her eyelids spilled over her cheeks now. “I knew it,” she whispered. “I’m doomed either way, then.”
Yeah, sure. Don’t worry about your fiancé or his health, his life. Or mine. Just about your own. I knew better than to say any of those words out loud, but people like Jennifer disgusted me.
“I have to go,” I said. I’d had just about enough of this house, and wealth, the urge to own things that didn’t matter at all. The betrayal.
She stood up without a word and walked me to the door. I walked down the driveway, which curled around the trees growing alongside it, and when I stood outside the gate and it closed firmly shut behind me, I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.
This was the last time I was going to try to help someone.
Vampire's Shade 1 (Vampire's Shade Collection) Page 11
