The Better to Eat You With: The Red Journals (32 page)

“It’s called
misting
,” he told me again,
rolling his eyes.

“I’m sorry—”

“Your forgiven,” he interrupted.

I scowled, then continued, “But what the friggin’ hell
is misting?”

“I can dissolve myself down to a molecular level. In
other words, I literally become mist. And I can travel that way.” He shrugged.
“Comes in handy.”

“This is how your scent disappeared outside the bar in
Summersville.” I realized. “This is how you managed to avoid me in Osiris’s
house for so long.” I gasped in outrage. “
This
is how you got in front
of your car so bloody fast when I was trying to escape!”

“A gentleman always has his secrets,” Felix swaggered.

I snorted. “Gentleman, my arse.”

He arched a brow, and ignored my comment. “Vampires
acquire abilities the older they get,” he explained, taking a step forward.
“It’s why we never disclose our age.”

“Because then everyone would know how powerful you are,”
I surmised, his spicy, exotic scent wrapping around me and drowning out the unsavory
sharpness of cleaning products.

“Which is why most Vampires will not be so inclined to
enjoy that wonderful ability you have of gauging their age as accurately as you
do.” And then he was right in front of me, and for the first time since I met
this damn Vampire, I didn’t have to look up at him.

And all it took was a bucket.

“Well,” I said breathlessly, “it’s not like I go
around advertising.”

Felix’s smile was rather devilish then. “I should hope
not, pet.” His eyes drifted down my outfit, then back up to my eyes. “Where did
you get the uniform?”

I cleared my throat and tugged on my short pleated
skirt. “It’s Jade’s old Private School one.” I tilted my chin up, even as a
blush raced across my cheeks when his eyes dipped down to the straining shirt
buttons. I was a little more endowed than Jade had been at fifteen.

“Looks a little…tight,” Felix observed, flooding our
connection with excitement.

“It’s a little snug, in places.” I hunched my shoulders
a little, trying to shrink my own chest. It didn’t work.

Felix grinned, gave me a quick heated kiss, and then
turned for the door. “Come along, Wendy.”

I hopped off the bucket. “Fuck off, Alistair.”

His chuckled warmed me to my core.

This little breaking-and-entering mission was all
about timing. The guards did rounds of each floor every half hour. We had
nineteen minutes until that round started again, which under normal
circumstances would have allowed Felix and me to be in and out in half that
time. However,
Natasha had the wonderful fortune to
be an executive personal assistant to one of the top company dogs. According to
Felix, it had taken Natasha twelve years to work her way up to her position,
and the sensitive information she became privy to was invaluable to someone in
Felix’s line of work—whatever that was.

“You’ve been hunting him
that long?” I’d asked Felix.

“Nearly four decades,” he
replied, eyes cold, memories of atrocities I could only guess at running
through his mind.

Natasha had been Felix’s
eyes and ears in one of the biggest Immortal companies in the world…even if the
Immortal in question wasn’t exactly on par with the rest of the society.
Whatever information was likely to be on the USB we were trying to decrypt would
no doubt be gold.

I sincerely hoped so,
since the executives at G.C. Logistics, and their assistants, worked on one of
the top two floors that demanded the use of a private elevator on the opposite
side of the building to the one I had hiked a lift on. And it didn’t run at
night. To get to it, Felix and I had to skirt a whole floor of cubicles while
dodging the occasional security camera, then break into the elevator shaft, go
up said shaft somehow, and into the private, heavily monitored executive
offices, without setting off any alarms.

Piece of cake!

Once we’d managed to get
onto the encoded, heavily monitored and tightly secured office floor, and into
the ever-changing personalized pin and print-activated offices, and then into
the every-changing personalized pin and print-activated filing cabinets and
drawers, we had to get back out again. All without setting off any alarms.

Yeah. Totally a piece
of cake.

“Hallo, Kiddy Cat,” I murmured into the dainty
comm-system perched in my ear. “Can you purr for me?” A slow grin spread across
my face as Fletch’s familiar deep rumble of a purr vibrated through the sound
check. Felix arched a brow at me from his squat on the other side of the
cubicle.

“A voice for late-night
luuuuurve
,” Fletch
added.

“Wrong target audience,” Vince grumbled.

“Jail Bait looks entertained,” Felix drawled,
referring to my outfit

I scowled playfully, tugging at my skirt. “I like
being sweet talked into things.”

“I’ll remember that,” Vince replied huskily, and
Felix’s eyes flared with gold at the challenge.

“Watch your step, pup,” the Vampire said in a voice
low and brimming with hostility.

I rolled my eyes.

“You watch yours, bat boy,” Vince replied, and Fletch
snickered across the line.

“All right, boys. Rein in the pissing contest. We got
work to do.” I gave Felix a pointed look, and he blew me a kiss that made me
blush. “Kiddy-cat," I said, voice strangled, “how we looking?”

“No alarms triggered as yet, and the airwaves are
clear.”

Excellent. That meant no Chicago Police Department. I
respect their jobs, but not when it interfered with mine.

“Big Dog? How goes street-level?”

Vince was outside with his lieutenants keeping watch
for any unwanted visitors not announced on the police dispatch.

“Perfect for ducks,” he grumbled. “But clear of anything
else…Jail Bait.” Vince’s tone was decidedly provocative, proving that he wasn’t
in the least bit worried about the Vampire opposite me with an irritated
expression on his face.

Fletch snickered again.

With a dramatic, heavy sigh, I replied, “Then let’s go
get my lollipop.”

Peeking out of the cubicle, down each end of the long aisle,
then up at the little glass orbs in the corners, I narrowed my Vampire gaze on
the lens beneath the tinted glass. The camera was reflecting the light ever so
nicely if you had the supernatural ability to see it, and when it was just
right, Felix was on his feet and moving up the aisle, and I was following on
his heel.

Felix’s dark form slinked along the shadowed cubicles
like a wraith through the dust of a deserted town. Sometimes I couldn’t even
see him, until the moon caught his hair, or the gleam of his eyes, or the
shimmering paleness of his skin when he glanced back at me. The Vampire was in
his element, and a wonder to behold. He was lithe, graceful, and sexy, and as I
followed him through the ugly-grey-divider-jungle, I thought for an instant
that I might follow him anywhere, and be happy to.

As long as he kept looking at me the way he kept
looking at me.

How could a girl resist that?

“Toad in the hole, peeps,” Fletch’s voice suddenly
purred softly in my ear. “Duck ‘n’ cover. I repeat, duck ‘n’ cover.” And then a
toilet flush sounded not far off up ahead of us.

Felix slipped right into the shadow of a cubicle. I
went left under a desk and pulled the chair in close. The heavy clump of
steel-toe caps thudded leisurely towards us then, and a low jaunty whistle as a
bright beam of light flashed past our cubicles. I froze, my hand gripping the
edge of the chair wedged against me, and wished Fletch would stop humming
Labrinth and Emeli Sande’s ”Beneath your Beautiful” in my ear. He couldn’t have
picked a more un-mission-like song
ever
. What happened to the James Bond
theme? Or even The White Stripes?

The security guard with his bright light and cheerful
whistling wandered past us, swaggering, hand on his belt, and I wondered
inanely if he remembered to wash his hands.

Then we were on the move again.

I swung my pack around to my front as we swiftly moved
to the elevator and squatted down by the security panel. Felix was prying off
the panel as I got the wires and keycard sorted to hack the motherboard. Sliding
in the hook-ups and then slipping a coded passkey card in, I watched the dial
race with numbers, praying this wasn’t one of Fletch experiments. That all the
security from this floor up would be out for twenty minutes, while Felix went
to work jimmying open the elevator doors.

“Kiddy Cat, we good to go?” Fletch’s job was to upload
an interference virus into the security system of the elevators to give us
temporary access, and then it would dissolve and become untraceable.

Beat of silence. “Security system has a cold.”

I snickered at the Independence Day line.

“Go!”

The red security beams were already flickering and
going out by the time Felix was done wedging them open, and I was slipping
Fletch’s naughty little toy back into my pack. Whatever little coded sequence
they scattered ensured the alarms wouldn’t go off when we forced the elevator
doors open upstairs.

“After you, pet.” Felix bowed his head and swept out
an arm, all gentleman-like.

“You just want to look up my skirt.” I smirked,
swinging out and latching onto the metal ladder to the left of the open doors.

“Think of it as me sweet talking you,” he offered,
swinging out to the metal ladder on the right. He leaned over and dislodged the
rubber wedge holding the doors open.

“Pervy Vampire,” I remarked over the swish of closing
steel.

He shrugged. “It’s an age thing.”

“It’s a
Felix
thing.”

“Oh, pet,” he purred, pausing on the ladder as I
continued, leaning precariously over to blatantly look up at me. “You think you
know me so well.”

“Oh please,” I retorted dryly, “I hardly think Osiris
is the kind to look up women’s skirts.” I lost sight of him as I shimmied
behind the edge of elevator.

“You’d be surprised,” Felix replied, and I ducked down
to give him a sharp look.

“Indeed, I would be,” I told him before continuing to
the top of the metal box. Hopping up onto the top, Felix pulled open the escape
hatch and dropped silently inside. I wobbled with the elevator, and then followed
him down. We paused at the elevator doors of the executive level.

“What would he do? Steeple his fingers and silently
contemplate the novelty of the female posterior?”

Felix removed the key-card from my pack and started on
the elevator keyboard. Red lights flashed, and then went out. “Or all the ways
to
boink
them.”

I laughed at that, remembering his mock-horror when I
used it to refer to him a few days back. “You have no shame!” I shook my head,
reaching for the seam in the middle of the elevator doors.

“What have I got to be ashamed of?” He asked with a
wicked smile, reaching across to get his own grip, his tone hinting at all
kinds of brazen behavior.

“And I reiterate;
pervy
Vampire.” I began to
pull on my side of the elevator doors, casually wondering if I might be out of
my league when it came to this Vampire. He was older, far more experienced—in
more than the carnal sense—and made me feel all kinds of warm and fuzzy inside.

“If I’m pervy,” Felix said, pulling his own side, “what
does that make you, since you let me look?”

I grinned. “That makes me clever.”

And the doors slid open.

“Nineteen and a half minutes before you have to get to
the roof,” Fletch softly informed us as we scrambled onto the lushly carpeted
executive floor, and I
did
waste precious moments gawking around at how
completely different this office floor was to the one just below it.

The whole floor was quartered, but not by anything as
mundane as a wall, or as cheap as a cubicle divider. No, no. Glass was abundant
there, like a veritable crystal ball. It was walls and doors and ceilings,
tables and chairs and shelves and ornaments. A single sweeping walkway ascended
to the top level, it’s frosted glass floor flowing up like water to the thick
frosted floor of the executive offices up top. God forbid anyone wore a skirt
up here. It’d be a show for anyone assisting. The whole two levels looked
immense. An enormous semiprecious stone maze, glittering and shimmering in the
moon and starlight that occasionally showed through the storm clouds in the
sky, and shined down through the uncovered skylights in the upper floor’s
ceiling.

I was in awe.

Maybe I’ll decorate my house in Italy like this…

“Eighteen minutes now,” said a voice in my ear, making
me jump. “Nearly ten ‘til rounds.” I looked frantically around the shadowed
glass cage and spotted Felix rummaging around an oval desk, the padded black
leather chair shoved aside, and hurried over to join him.

“How do you know this is Natasha’s?” I asked.

Felix glanced up at me, and then pointed at an
art-deco figurine. A dancer up on her toes, one arm stretched high, the other
trailing behind her, a sash of cloth spreading out as it fell. It was quite
stunning. An iridescent silver expression of the same beautiful pieces I’d seen
bathing in moonlight in her house.

“Ah…” I murmured, and reached out a hand to skim the
tips of my fingers down the elegant dancer’s spine. I wonder what it was about
the flowing, elegant pieces that drew Natasha to them. Having not known the
woman, I couldn’t help but be curious. I’d never know her now, thanks to
Ambrose.

Ambrose, who was once my husband. And back to work.

Felix riffled through Natasha’s trays, shook out her
planner and business card box before up-turning her index and scattering
address and phone number flash cards all over the desk. I yanked open drawers
and cabinets around her desk, and searched intensely through them, inspecting
each item, from pens to staple boxes to highlighter pens to files and what was
under it all, searching for secret compartments. Any flash drives found were
shoved into my pack to look through later.

But my eyes kept returning to the figurine.

Caving to my drives, I abandoned my search of the
drawers, and circled back around the desk to the figurine. I traced her lines,
my fingers searching for something my mind could not fathom, but that my
instincts were all but screaming I find. There was something about the figure, something
that didn’t seem, right. It didn’t seem as fluid as the other figurines in
Natasha’s house had. Yet, it would have blended in perfectly unless singled out
for inspection. A close inspection, like what I was doing now.

I hefted up the statue and was surprised by how heavy
the base was. I turned it this way and that, looking for catches, buttons or
fine seams where something might pop out like the business card one.

Nothing.

I wonder if all this hanging with the big boys has
screwed my instincts…

With a sigh, I gave up on the figurine. Following my
gut was not getting us anywhere, obviously, however much it burned right. I
turned the figurine back up-right by its arm and—

Bong! Thump!

I froze at the ridiculously loud reverberating sound
of the heavy figurine base hitting the desk and then the floor. It vibrated
through my feet even as I jumped out the way, and I was pretty sure that, even
without supernatural hearing, anyone downstairs would have heard that. And the
rounds weren’t that far off.

“What was that?” both Vince and Fletch asked in my
ear.

Felix glared at me, and I was mid-wince when I realized
something was in my hand. Frowning, I opened my fingers, stared down at the
figurines arm, then down at the armless figurine, and then back at my palm. Most
distinctly, the USB connection at the base of the arm.

I looked up sharply at Felix, eyes wide. “I just found
our gold.”

“Good,” Fletch said. “Because in about thirty seconds
you’re gonna have company.”

“We got two unmarked sedans and a van down here, y’all,”
Vince added. “About a dozen black-clad males and—
whoa!
”