He shook his head. “I can’t live with that. I can’t take on that . . . breakage.”
I was torn between outraged silence and screaming, but I chose to speak calmly. “I don’t have a choice.”
“I guess . . . this isn’t going to work, then. I am sorry. I am.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m a great girl, except for the ghosts and the craziness.” He shifted in his seat and I held up my hand to stop him. “No. I think it’s my turn to go.”
I got up, still holding my coffee cup. I handed it to a waiter as he passed. “I can’t finish this.” Then I looked back down at Will. It seemed like I ought to kiss him good-bye—a nice Hollywood gesture—but I didn’t. “I am sorry, too, Will. I love you but I don’t belong with you.”
I left, villainous and caddish, because although I felt angry and wrecked and horrid I was also relieved. At least it was over and I didn’t have to care about anyone but me. I wondered if by “breakage, ” Will meant mine. Maybe he thought I was crazy and that’s what he couldn’t bear. Or maybe he got it and he just couldn’t face that. Even a tiny dose of the Grey was more than I’d wish on most people, and certainly not on Will, no matter how upset or brokenhearted I was.
Driving was difficult. My eyes kept tearing up and the fog of the Grey seemed worse with the snow light. The road was icy and treacherous—like me, I thought, and then got angry with myself for it. Anger made the tears stop, at least, and I thought I would not go home and feel sorry for myself.
I killed time going to the gym and then doing some research for Nanette Grover’s cases before I headed home again, a little depressed and just wanting to be alone with the simple needs of home and pet. I did chores and played with Chaos for a while. The weather didn’t seem to be agreeing with her, and I caught her shivering a few times. I wondered if I ought to turn up the heat in the condo, though it didn’t seem uncomfortable to me. I reminded myself that she was six years old, so she was entitled to an occasional bout of crankiness, and offered her a raisin, which elicited a bouncing war dance and begging for more treats. She tried to steal any treats I might be hiding by climbing my legs and searching in my sweaters before crawling around my shoulders to get tangled in my hair and plant whiskery ferret kisses on my face and neck.
“Have you had that cuteness patented yet?” I asked. Annoyed at the lack of additional raisins, Chaos didn’t deign to reply but scampered back down my body to tell her troubles to Nixon the Eggplant as she forced him—with a protesting blat—into a favorite hidey-hole next to the entertainment center. I could hear the toy uttering sporadic squawks and squeaks as Chaos bit and shoved it.
My attempts to rescue Nixon from the lair were interrupted by a phone call from Edward about a half hour after sundown. He purred his delight at my desire to meet. We agreed on eight o’clock at the After Dark—barely the shank of a winter evening for a vampire. I wished Quinton could come along as my body-guard, but I knew Edward wouldn’t approve and I didn’t want him in a bad mood, however much I despised the necessity of going.
After dinner, I got dressed up as nicely as I could stand for the temperature—nice wool trousers instead of jeans and a better quality of sweater with dress boots instead of my usual urban hikers—and tucked the ferret back into her cage. I left her moping in her collection of old sweatshirt scraps as I headed out.
I had to stop by my office again before meeting Edward, and I needed a little extra time.
EIGHT
The After Dark club lies at the bottom of a circular marble staircase behind an iron gate that always seems to be locked. It’s the social club, audience chamber, court, and coliseum of the local vampire community—or pack, as I prefer to think of them. I’d let Quinton know where I was going and when—just in case I didn’t come back. I thought I could keep myself out of Edward’s clutches, but everything’s a bit of a crapshoot with vampires. They don’t have the same motives, fears, or taboos that humans have, and it’s all too easy to make a wrong assumption and end up a meal—or a toy, as one of my clients had discovered. I’d have to keep a tight rein on my recurring annoyance at the morning’s scene with Will, too, or I’d be easy prey while distracted.
Even at a distance, I could feel their presence as a boil of fire and ice that sent billows of red and black into the Grey around the door. I took a couple of deep, steadying breaths of the frigid air and started down the stairs. The gate clanged shut behind me, cutting off a few hardy idiots who’d decided to come down to Pioneer Square to party in the densely packed clubs, bars, and restaurants the area was famous for. They wouldn’t have liked the reception at the After Dark, even if they’d gotten past the doorman, who opened the black lacquered doors as I reached the bottom landing.
He wasn’t quite a vampire, as far as I could tell. The usual aura of death, blood, and magic wasn’t the right density and he didn’t exude the psychic stink I associated with bloodsuckers. He was even a bit nondescript—which was something most vampires didn’t bother to cultivate. He looked me over with a flick of his gaze and held the door for me. “Ms. Blaine.” He put out his hand for my coat, but I didn’t surrender it. I never had before and I wasn’t going to this time, either; the undead don’t care what the air temperature is and there wasn’t much warmth to the air that crept from the open doorway. I didn’t know how long it would take to get the information I needed, but I’d be damned if I’d court hypothermia for it.
After a moment of wondering if he should allow such cheek on my part, the doorman let me pass into the club proper.
Just stepping past the foyer doors made me feel a little ill. The low-lit room looked a lot like a nightclub from a forties-era film, but this one was populated with flickering images of the past as well as the vampires, wrapped in black-and-red energy coronas. They watched me cross the room with unconcealed curiosity, every stare a blade. I was pretty sure they all knew who I was and that I had some status with Edward. They also knew I was off-limits unless things changed. Some of them must have hoped it would.
The normal grid of the Grey’s energy lines seemed slightly skewed and blurred, though I didn’t know why, nor had I noticed it the only other time I’d been here. But I’d been a little busy on that visit and hadn’t had the concentration to spare for studying the oddities of the ether. I also realized that there were very few ghosts, in spite of the thick presence of death. I pushed aside speculation and fear and headed deeper into the room, toward a corner booth where I’d spotted Edward and a few of his cronies.
I caught myself frowning as I drew closer. There were three people with Edward: two men in suits who seemed to be flunkies of some sort and a thin woman with long strawberry blond hair. They were all vampires, but the woman had a very dim aura devoid of the heavy blackness of most and she was dressed in a romantic sort of gown made of a floating white fabric—not Goth-y, but more like a costume from a Pre-Raphaelite painting. With that thought I recognized her and stopped a little short of the table, surprised.
Edward glanced up at me, already waving the men away. He still looked like a shorter version of Pierce Brosnan frozen at an unaging forty—and had the accent to go with it. “A moment, if you don’t mind,” he said. Then he turned his attention back to Gwen.
He may have been as fixed as Dorian Gray, but Gwen had changed a lot since I’d first seen her wafting, almost as insubstantial as a ghost, around the Grand Illusion movie theater. Where she had been colorless and fading in the Gray before, her energy signature was now taking on threads and swirls of red and black. It was still a very small aura, but it was discernibly there. She had been sickly and I hadn’t then realized that she’d been starving to death in a strange way, slowing fading from both worlds and spiraling down to apathy, madness, and self-destruction. That was not the case now.
I didn’t know if I was pleased at the prospect of any vampire gaining strength, but I wasn’t entirely unhappy to see someone who had been so pathetic reversing the downward trend of her . . . unlife? I don’t suffer the self-pitying
too well and “Lady Gwendolyn of Anorexia” had been among the worst. Boredom I could understand, but most vampires tend more toward arrogance than ennui, and a vampire with a total lack of interest in survival seems contrary to their nature—at least so far as I could understand it.
I watched Edward whisper something in Gwen’s ear and then kiss the back of her hand before shooing her on her way. Gwen smiled and edged out of the booth, turning the expression on me as she stood. A sharp-toothed smile I didn’t like one bit.
“Hello,” she murmured in a breathy voice. “I’m so pleased to see you again.”
I gave her a small nod. “You seem to be doing well,” I observed in as neutral a voice as I could manage.
“I am,” she replied, nodding with enthusiasm. “I am. I don’t drink tea anymore.”
“You still go to movies and play role-playing games?”
“Oh, no. I’m much too busy. I miss the movies, though. Before winter’s over, maybe I’ll go to some again. Long nights offer so much more to do.”
“I’m sure.”
She glanced back at Edward and chuckled, touching her tongue to her front teeth, before floating away.
I slid onto the nearest seat of the booth, keeping close to the outside.
“Taking on more projects?” I asked Edward, arching an eyebrow.
“Still mending fences—as you forced me to do.”
“As if that was such a bad idea.” The cold and nausea I experienced in the company of vampires was tempered with a roaring sexual heat Edward put out whenever he looked at me. I kept my distance both physical and emotional, maintaining a pointed cynicism as a ward against his routine manipulations. I didn’t care to be the next plaything in Edward’s collection. Gwen seemed to be recovering from that—depending on your definition of “recovery. ” Most of his casual toys didn’t do so well.
He forced a sigh—very theatrical in someone who never breathes. “You are truly a demanding taskmistress, Harper.” He drawled my name with a purring sound that stroked down my spine with an insidious, lulling warmth and distracted me a moment from his moving closer.
“You don’t seem to suffer much on account of it,” I said, noticing his sudden proximity and giving him a warning glance. There was no place to recoil to without standing up, but I couldn’t do that; the interview would end one way or another the moment I let him get the better of me. I didn’t have much tolerance for any male playing games with me at that moment, but I’d have to go along at least for a while in spite of my distaste. I thought a defensive chill of disapproval was a little risky, but safer than any false friendliness. I set my teeth and kept to my seat.
Edward picked up my hand and held it in both of his, studying it as if he’d find some secret in the shape and arrangement of the bones beneath the skin. “My dear, I suffer the lack of your skills and guidance.”
I pulled my hand back from his with some difficulty, feeling a sickening, artificially induced reluctance to remove myself from his ramped-up heat. “If you lay that on any thicker you’ll need a trowel,” I said. I wouldn’t have been so bold if we’d never met before—even playing the noble suitor, he still had an edge of malice and considerable power to exercise it—but I thought the score between us wasn’t so uneven as he did. Yes, I had convinced him to do things he didn’t care for and he’d suffered physical harm for it, but the end results had been much better for him than for me.
“I’ve been very patient,” he started, letting his projection grow colder. The rolling unpleasantness of his annoyance made me queasy, but the chill was a relief. Still, I could sense him readying another tactic. “How long do you intend to pretend that your tiny existence, your tiny home, your tiny job, and your mayfly friends satisfy your talents? You could do so much more. And I grow extremely tired of waiting for you to earn out your debt.”
I laughed. I hadn’t expected him to be so clumsy about it. “What debt? As I recall we’re pretty even on the who-owes-who score. I brought some problems to your attention which, if left alone, would have destroyed you, and in exchange I asked for no favors for myself, only for payment to those you already owed. You got to keep your fiefdom, you got to be a hero, you got to play magnanimous lord of the manor and clean house of your enemies in one swoop. And—let me see—you saved Seattle and got Carlos back into your camp, which were certainly unexpected assets for you. How is that a debt on my part?”
“You got your payment for it,” he replied, his voice chilling further, even while I saw a gleam in his eye at the anticipated snap of his trap. I thought I’d play along just a little further before I disarmed him.
“I got nothing but survival, a new set of scars, and an association with you and your kind I could happily do without. Yes, my cases closed, but the consequences of them aren’t anyone’s idea of a reward.”
He leaned in a little, trying to catch my eye. If I let him capture my gaze he’d set his hook, whether he had a real claim or not, so I turned my head, glaring at him from the corners of my narrowed eyes.
Frustrated, his voice dropped to a hiss. “There is the small matter of a check, which you accepted and which therefore binds you to me in debt, since, as you point out, I owed you nothing.”
“Oh, yeah. Even ‘gifts’ come with a price.” I brought the heavy cream envelope out of my purse, meeting his eyes now, and snapped it onto the table between us. The sound reverberated like a broken guitar string. “You mean this check?”
I’d kept the check in its envelope in the bottom drawer of my office desk since the night it dropped through my mail slot. There were a lot of zeros in the amount line, but the temptation they represented hadn’t outweighed the servitude I’d been quite sure would come with it. I’d twigged to the real cost of unearned rewards at an early age when I’d been offered an advance out of the chorus line—if I’d submit to the unpleasant kinks of the musical director. I hadn’t learned the lesson well enough, though, and had been caught few times before I’d had it hammered into my knowledge of the world like a spike—the final time with the back of someone’s hand.
I approach all offers of free lunches with suspicion, and the more lavish they are, the greater my skepticism. After my initiation into the Grey and with the effects of magical bindings lingering still, I had imagined the price would be even worse where magic and vampires were involved. Judging from Edward’s reaction and the feel of shattered magic lying between us, cynicism had been the right choice.
I watched Edward pick up the envelope and draw the check and its note—“for services to the community”—out. The temperature dropped until my breath left ice crystals dancing in the air between us. Fury isn’t always hot—if it had been, the paper would have been rendered into ash too fast to watch.
Edward placed the papers on the table with a delicate touch, as though something might break if he exerted even a gram more force. “Ah.”
“You should check your own bank statements,” I suggested. “Your accountants fell down on the job. I’ve had that since last May, but you didn’t notice it hadn’t been deposited.”
He raised his gaze to my face, neutral on the surface, but the aura around his head was shot with bolts of furious red lightning in a boiling black storm. Then he sat back, the squall of anger blowing out as fast as it had blown in. He shook his head.
“I should have known it wouldn’t work with you.”
“We’re not all that venal,” I said.
“Oh, it wasn’t venality I thought might catch you.” He didn’t say what he had thought would ensnare me, though. “But I’ve wasted enough time with this. What do you want from me—and this time you may very well incur a debt.”
“Don’t try and rope me, Edward. I just need information; I’m not asking for a favor.”
“Very well,” he snapped. “What do you want to know?”
“Who is killing the homeless in Pioneer Square?”
He seemed surprised. “However should I know? And why did you think I would?”
; “The deaths have been very odd—not much blood in the bodies, hands and legs apparently chewed off in some cases.”