Chapter Eighteen
I knocked on Eladio’s door, bouncing on the soles of my feet until he opened it.
“That suits you,” I said, pointing toward the black eye patch secured around his wide head. He lifted his lip in a silent snarl. I raised the tray I carried. “Delivery for you. Two packs of blood. Petr said it’s A, which apparently means you’ll like it.”
He snatched the blood packs and the tube running from his IV bumped against the tray. He paused, and I sucked in a breath.
“Hurts, don’t it?” I turned the tray and held it against my hip. “Is that positive or negative?”
“What?” If his voice was any flatter, he’d have turned one-dimensional.
“Positive or negative? Your special A.”
Eladio smiled, and that was almost worse than the snarl. “It’s Anna,” he said, before slamming the door in my face.
Oh.
My nose crinkled up.
Eww.
I didn’t like my deliveries having names.
I stopped two doors down and tapped lightly. A woman—human—opened it. Beyond her, the room was all rich purple walls and violet gossamer drapery, except for the sleek chrome IV stand. The candles barely cast enough light for me to see Soraya lying on a low, spare bed. Her right arm was swathed in bandages, and still slightly too short.
“I told you we would send word when she wakes,” the girl whispered. I’d borrowed clothes from her. I thought her name might be Mirasol. The line between my eyes deepened. Six hours and the vampiress still wasn’t conscious. Mirasol put her hand on my arm and smiled warmly. “She will be all right. She’s been through worse. This is nothing.”
My eyes widened. “Limb loss counts as nothing around here?” Still smiling, she closed the door in my face.
Maybe I was being a little annoying. I couldn’t stop moving, couldn’t force myself to sit for more than a couple of minutes. Petr had forced food on me in the kitchen while he dispensed supplies to various parties. And then he’d tried to occupy me with delivering medical supplies and blood to the private quarters upstairs. Most of Malcolm’s people had come back, though none in the same shape they’d gone out in.
Terrance hadn’t made it. He’d been brought back in one of the other limos that had somehow been waiting for us when we staggered out of the burning warehouse into the cold, clean air, and I only saw his body—what was left of it—when it was carried into the club.
A crowd had gathered, vampires who either felt the turmoil or were given a heads-up by someone at the club in the chaos of our return. Humans had noted the traffic, and now a line of beating hearts stretched around the corner. Malcolm had cleaned up quickly, downed two quarts of blood—from a stainless-steel cup, I was happy to see—and gone down to hold court.
It was important after a major event, he’d explained brusquely, to make himself seen. To show the other vampires that Bronson’s proxy was still powerful, still in control. Petr had quietly instructed a cleanup crew to go to the warehouse and sent other minions—vampire and human alike—on various errands. The courier shops would be busy tonight. I suspected the orders hadn’t explicitly come from Malcolm, though the vamps followed them without question, which made Petr an intriguing human.
I jogged down the stairs and into the kitchen, dropping the tray onto the counter with a clatter. Petr raised an eyebrow.
“Sorry,” I muttered, running my thumb over the back of my left wrist again. It was bruised and sore, but whole. And I was still brimming with the energy I’d siphoned off of Vorster.
A porter dressed in a short, white jacket pushed through the swinging door and handed Petr a note. The door continued to swing, giving me quick flashes of the bar. Malcolm was around the corner, just out of sight.
“Anything else I can do?” I asked brightly. I didn’t really want to stop and think about what had happened, the horrible things I’d seen—and done—or the fact that I was now all fired up from the power of a vampire other than the one I’d chosen to be involved with.
If we were still involved after tonight.
Malcolm had kept one hand on me as he directed the roundup of Vorster’s remaining people, of which there were a few, but his face had been blank. What do you say to someone after his people were hurt defending you, after one of them was killed? Really killed. His body was disintegrating before we’d gotten back to the club, and we were ahead of daylight. The newspaper advice column, not the regular one about ugly wedding presents and in-laws, but the one focused on human-vampire etiquette, didn’t touch on that. I guess there weren’t many humans who found themselves in this type of situation.
“Take a look inside.” Petr gestured toward the round hole in the swinging door. I took a couple of hesitant steps toward it and glanced out.
Thurston and two other vampires sat at a four-top, dwarfing the normal-size table. They were all beat to hell, and the crowd was gawking at them like prizes were about to jump out of them. There weren’t any humans in the lounge tonight other than employees, which made me wonder why they were allowed to line up outside. Probably to increase the intrigue.
“Do you have any feelings about any of them?” Petr asked.
“Feelings?”
He held up the note and I swallowed hard. Was Malcolm asking what I wanted done with the vampires? Thurston’s elbows rested on his knees and he stared at the floor. Defeated. I raised a finger and tapped on the glass. A dozen heads swung toward me. Thurston raised his slowly. His eyes widened before he snapped his mask into place.
Petr jerked me away from the window. “I didn’t mean for you to reveal yourself.” His gaze roamed over me and narrowed on my chalky hair before he turned back to the operations center he’d set up for himself. “Not that anybody will recognize you after you bathe. You are going to bathe, aren’t you?”
“He…” I raised my hands and traced lines down my cheeks. “The one with the retro facial hair. He’s not such a bad guy. I think Vorster forced him to work for him. After the lady he was with…” The image of her swollen, distorted body invaded my mind.
“Livia,” Petr supplied. I stared at the tile wall, white and clean and firm.
“Yeah. Her. I don’t think he was with Vorster because he wanted to be. I don’t recognize the others.”
Petr scribbled on a slip of paper, then handed it to the porter, who promptly whisked it away.
“Petr, what happened to the rest of the Ra…the drug?”
He smiled mildly. “I’m just a driver.”
“You’re just a driver, my ass. Where is it?” I’d heard Malcolm specifically direct that the cases were to go to Petr when we returned.
His gray eyes narrowed. So the mild-mannered human wasn’t used to being challenged. I crossed my arms. He turned and pulled a kettle off the stove. “It was removed from the hives we knew to possess it last night. What was recovered from the warehouse will be examined and then all of it destroyed.”
“Not kept for evidence?”
“The inquest won’t be quite like you see on television.” He handed me a steaming cup of tea. “Go try to sleep off whatever it is you’ve taken. This is chamomile. It will help you calm down.”
“Thanks.” What I’d taken, indeed.
I slipped through the quiet hallways. Malcolm would finish up his duties and maybe, if he wasn’t still pissed, he’d come and find me. I wandered toward his room, pausing in the study to take a sip of tea. It tasted like moss and wet dog, and I set the cup on a small stand beside the door with Mal’s travel mug. A dark ring remained at the bottom. It looked so innocuous, it could have been anything. The bedroom was empty and I couldn’t make myself take the few steps necessary to walk into it. I didn’t belong here, alone in a building full of vampires.
Chapter Nineteen
Mickey was sitting on the stoop outside her apartment building when I walked up, a bottle of beer dangling by the neck between two fingers. Dawn had broken somewhere over the clouds, but the morning was cool and dismal. I’d washed my face and taken a taxi, too tired for a more evasive route. Even with Vorster dead, his men captured and the drugs seized, I’d been a paranoid mess the entire way. Now I was just tired. Mickey tipped the bottle back and surveyed me.
“How did the rest of your night go?” she asked. I stared at her for moment, reacquainting myself with her pleasant, tired, human face. She scrunched her nose up. “That bad?” How could I explain to her that the fact she wasn’t covered in blood made her the most welcome sight I’d seen in hours? My faith in the universe began to knit itself back together.
“Not good.” I dropped down next to her. She handed me a beer and I twisted the cap off and stuck it in my pocket before taking a long pull. “Is Tilde…?”
“She is well taken care of. They won’t know for certain until she has more…fluids. It was quite exciting, like they had trained their entire lives for a vampire-feeding case that bad and finally got to work one.” She tossed the empty bottle toward a trash bin about three feet away, missing by another three feet. “Carla showed up, with the authorities. Tilde would not talk, said she wanted someone from her embassy. She is very…embarrassed. Very sorry.”
“Is Carla pissed at you for helping me?” The beer was good, but it wasn’t warming me as quickly as I’d have liked. My jaw was tight, like I’d been trying to break rocks between my teeth. Maybe if I switched to a six-pack of vodka.
“She wasn’t happy, but she’s never happy. She’s like a door on the metro train. You’re trying to get through, but the lady in front of you has ten bags and you can’t get in without smashing her stuff, so Carla the door threatens to crush you.” I stared at Mickey and she raised her eyebrows as she opened the last beer. “It doesn’t matter how hard you try, she has her own agenda and doesn’t care.”
“That you can’t get around the bags any faster.” I finished the beer and turned the bottle in my hands. “I get it. She’ll calm down though, right? Where’s she going to get someone better than you?”
“She can me.”
I frowned. “She what?”
Mickey cocked her head to the side and looked up, thinking. “She can’t me?”
“She can’t you what? Oh.” I grabbed her arm. “She
canned
you? Like, fired you? You didn’t have anything to do with this!”
“Not for that. Tonight I said some things. Mean things. True things.” She waved a hand in a rolling motion. “Things about her plastic surgery. It was not pretty.” Jesus, I hadn’t wanted Mickey to get fired. I thought, if anything, Carla would just call her Maricela for a week, then forget about her involvement. Of course, I hadn’t expected sweet little Mickey to mouth off.
“Did you start drinking these before you got to the hospital?” I asked. She shook her head.
“These don’t have alcohol.”
I examined the bottle suspiciously. “Then why drink them?”
“I like the bubbles and was out of soda. Are you going back to the States?”
“Probably.” I coughed and my mouth filled with the taste of smoke. I ignored the raw, flickering film-reel images that accompanied it. “I won’t be able to work here anymore.” Even if I could get a job, which Carla would ensure I couldn’t, a bunch of vampires knew who I was, and had either caught my natural scent or—I shuddered—the scent of my blood.
“And your boyfriend? He is okay?”
“He’s okay.” I smiled faintly.
“What is it like, being with a vampire?”
I froze for a ridiculously long time, but my brain didn’t supply a way to deflect her question. Mickey blinked innocently, took a small sip. She knew I consorted with vampires. Hell, she’d seen me with one tonight. I sighed, unclenching one muscle at a time. What was the point in lying?
“I can’t really talk about it.” I closed my eyes. If she wanted details or asked who he was, I was going to have to walk away, and her company was soothing.
“He treats you well?”
“Yes.”
“Eh. You have free will and never complain about him. Sounds like he is better than many human boyfriends. Except you probably can’t watch movies together.”
“I tried to tell him a movie once.
Alien.
” I grinned. “He got all fixated on Jonesy. Didn’t think there’d be a cat in space.” We yawned in unison. “What are you going to do now? Keep working at the garage?”
She shook her head. “The owner is a friend of Carla’s. I worked with her first, then got this job. It will probably go away. They’re
deep
friends.” She gave me a meaningful look. “Maybe I will go to the States for awhile. I have some cousins in Arizona and Montana.”
“God, Mick. I’m sorry this happened.”
She yawned again. “It was a way to pass the time, earn some decent money, but it wasn’t forever. Do you know what that’s like?”
I’d had similar feelings just a few months earlier. It felt like years had passed since I’d decided to give up being a runner, to be myself. And what was I doing? Getting fired from a courier job and still using fake names. Plus, now I was deeper inside the vampire world than ever. But…I was happier. Or I would be after I got some sleep and figured out a way to give myself one-night amnesia.
“I want to meet someone,” Mickey went on, “ and have kids. Hard to do either of those things when I sleep all day and spend all night under the hood of a car.” She hopped off the steps and threw her bottles away.
“Is your passport in order?” I asked, standing and settling my bag. Her eyes brightened. “I’ll give you a buzz in the next few days, let you know where I’m going. Maybe we can do an Arizona to Montana road trip.”
“That would be great! A week on the open road, cactus and cowboys…”
“A week?
Pfffft.
Maybe a day.”
Mickey scrunched her nose up. “That sounds like a race, not a road trip.”
“It’s efficient.” I backed away down the sidewalk. “I’ll give you a call. And thanks, Mickey. For everything.”
She waved my gratitude off. “It’s nothing.” She went into her building and I began a long hunt for a cab.
* * *
Dust fluttered out of my hair when I shut the car door, and I sneezed. I needed a shower like a zombie needs brains. My filthy jacket and boots thunked onto the floor behind me as I walked through the house, undressing. The plastic flags in my verbs book fluttered and I strummed my fingers over them. Probably wouldn’t have much need for it in a few days. I stopped in the doorway to the bedroom.
Malcolm sat on the bed, shirt unbuttoned halfway, legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles, one hand holding a wet cloth over his eyes. Candlelight played up the red highlights in his hair, as well as the bruises on the outside of his hand. My eyes went from the bare skin of his chest to his thighs stretching his pants tight. I licked my lips, then felt like a jerk because he was hurt—hell, I’d even stabbed him a little—and here I was eyeing him like a piece of meat. A gorgeous, heroic piece of meat, whose energy wrapped softly around me, warm and fluid—
“Do you want me to invite you in?” He didn’t sound happy, and my chest tightened. “You could have asked for a driver, you know. You didn’t have to sneak away.”
“I needed some air and I had to check on something. Are you okay?”
“I have a headache.”
I tapped the side of my foot against the doorway. “What, like a vampire migraine?”
“Like a Sydney Kildare special,” he snapped. I winced.
“Do you want some aspirin?”
He sighed and dropped the hand that held the cloth. He looked exhausted, thinner than he’d been even a few hours earlier, with blue veins showing beneath his eyes. He was still so gorgeous I could hardly breathe. I was sticky with nondairy creamer—I’d learned what the dust was on the ride back—and covered in blood and sweat.
“I asked you to stay, Sydney. What were you thinking?”
I picked at the doorframe. “Soraya said Vorster was a sneaky double-crossing prick, so I figured you shouldn’t be meeting him without backup. I mean…” I raised my gaze, struggling against my sucker-induced ADD.
“You thought I went alone?” he asked, then dropped his head back and laughed. “I had a cadre of ten with me, all soldiers. It would have been suicide otherwise.”
“Vorster had, like, thirty guys!”
“I underestimated his clout by a bit.” He shrugged, as if being outnumbered three to one wasn’t a big deal. Although, maybe it hadn’t been. “My soldiers were hidden. Well hidden, if
you
didn’t sense them, and converged on me when the fight broke out.”
Relief made my knees weak. “I thought, if you didn’t take Soraya, that it meant you’d gone alone.”
“I took Bronson’s people because I didn’t want to lose any of my own.” His face blanked out again. “Why couldn’t you have stayed behind, just this once?”
“First of all, I didn’t know you had soldiers with you, and secondly…he was your friend, Malcolm. Maybe he hadn’t been for a long time, but he was once. And you went to confront him anyway. That’s…rough.”
He swung his legs off the bed and rested his elbows on his knees. “I didn’t go to confront him. I went to kill him.” That hung between us as his anger clouded the room. My mouth dried out, because for the first time since I’d met him he seemed dangerous. He’d frightened me before, when he’d hunted me down after I fled Anchorage. I’d seen him fight and I’d seen him kill, but I’d never seen him so cold.
If Vorster hadn’t held such a grudge, they’d probably still have been friends, but Mal killed him anyway. Not because he’d been ordered to. Not in that hot, desperate moment of a fight, when he knew it was Vorster or him. He’d received an invitation telling him where Vorster was, and decided to go kill him. Malcolm’s eyes turned hard and gold, and I knew with a certainty that it hadn’t been the first time he’d done something like that.
“I’m going to clean up.” I skirted the bed, then paused, shot nerves making me smile like a fool. “I’m sorry. For everything.”
“You didn’t cause any of this.” He sounded perplexed. It was such a vampire response, ignoring all the details and steps in between his falling out with Vorster and last night’s fight.
The bloody battle was Vorster’s fault, but if I had trusted Malcolm to take care of it, Soraya would be fine, and Terrance would still exist. Guilt burned in the pit of my stomach. “I’m still sorry.”
I closed the door, peeled off my foul clothes, and cranked the water until it was almost unbearably hot. I lathered and scrubbed from head to toes. Twice.
Death had to mean something different to vampires. After their change, they could suffer something like death—either through injury or starvation—and be revived. Sunlight caused true death, nullifying the connection of body and power, but there weren’t many other things that could really kill a vampire. So maybe they got desensitized to it. Maybe saying “I went to kill him” was like saying “I really laid into the cable company because they didn’t get here between two and five, and boy was I peeved.”
Except that didn’t change what it meant to me. I reached for the shampoo, caught movement out of the corner of my eye and screamed. Malcolm smiled, his eyes crinkling as he closed the glass door behind him. “You said you like having a shower buddy.”
“Not a
sneaky
shower buddy. I’m barely even decent.” I crossed an arm over my chest, belatedly modest. He snorted.
“You’re naked. That’s as indecent as you can get. Without help, anyway. Turn around.” I turned mechanically and he worked shampoo into my hair. How could he be so tender with me when he was capable of doing what I’d seen last night?
“I was glad you were there,” he said.
I shook my head, flinging green-tinted suds against the dark slate wall. “No you weren’t.”
“I’d rather you were wearing a helmet and chain mail. While in a shark cage. But you allowed me to stay focused. I should have taken him down years ago. I kept hoping he’d get over it, but he was getting worse. More desperate. More dangerous. He was going to give the Radia to the younger hives, the ones close to their change, who still have living family. Many of them…enough of them would have been tempted that the human population here would have been decimated.”
At the thought of the streets overrun with mutated vampires, I shuddered.
“You’re barely bruised,” he murmured, curiosity infusing his words. “And you haven’t stopped moving for hours. Why is that?”
“Adrenaline,” I hedged. “Nervous energy.”
“You should have crashed by now, if that’s all it was.” He massaged my scalp. I groaned and let my head fall back.
“You lent me energy in the warehouse. And I sort of—” I put my hands up like I was holding an invisible basketball, “—took. From Vorster. You had the same maker, right?”
He hands stopped, and suds ran down my back. Maybe that wasn’t the right thing to bring up after he’d killed his…well, I guess that would make Vorster his brother, in a sense.
“We did,” he said slowly. He turned me around and I closed my eyes and leaned back into the spray. He followed, his body hard and hot against mine. “You could sense that, feel Hendrik, like you do me?”
The parts of him I was feeling right then were nothing I’d had any intention of touching on Vorster. I shook my head. “The frequency of the current was the same, so it was like, I don’t know, hearing the same sequence of notes. But when it touched me, he was cold and bristly, and you always feel warm.” I placed my hand on his chest. “Anyway, my wrist was broken or something and I figured if I could heal with you, I could do the same with him. Except it hurt so fucking bad that I just…” My eyes shot open and my pulse sped up at the memory of the pain and panic. I’d almost been bitten, and taken, and possibly cut into little pieces.
Malcolm wrapped his arms around me. “Breathe.” He stroked my back for a long, lovely couple of minutes. “I wondered why he slowed down. I thought I’d finally gotten lucky. But you were siphoning from him. That’s amazing.” He laughed, a lazy rumble that eased my nerves. “Just, please don’t—”
“I know. I won’t tell anyone.”