I paid for insurance and overnight shipping to New Orleans and though it was an exorbitant price, I didn’t blink at the cost. Another way the vamps had ruined me. Money meant a lot less now, was a lot less dear.
I saw my reflection in the windows against the night outside. I looked like I’d been crying, my face strained and flushed. I took my receipts and left.
Inside the little town I also found a pay phone. I hadn’t seen one of those in forever. I went back to the UPS store and held a twenty up to the locked door, mouthing, “Change? Please?” Maybe it was the tear streaks on my face, but something worked because he cleared all the change out of his cash register for me. I tipped him another five. He was a happy camper. But he’d surely remember me.
Standing in the dark, I inserted coins and called Bruiser on the pay phone. He answered with a simple hello. He sounded very British in that moment, though he hadn’t been British since the early nineteen hundreds. He also sounded distant and unapproachable. If Leo told him to kill me, would he do it? I honestly didn’t know, and it was dangerous to be attracted to a man whose loyalties lay elsewhere. “Hello?” he repeated.
“Your pilot is dead,” I said. “Stuck to the bulkhead wall by nails just like a bug on display. His blood was sprayed all over the Lear.” My voice sounded hollow, empty, and rough as broken stone. “Your new first mate was drained and left on the bunk I slept on. The air traffic controller was injured. It was done by two blood-servants, one vamp. They knew where I’d be.” I placed a hand over the envelope in my pocket, the one I had taken from the drained body of the new first mate. It bent under the pressure but didn’t crinkle, a heavy cotton fiber paper. Bruiser started to reply but I interrupted with “You have a serious leak. I’ll get home on my own. We’ll talk then.” I hung up, walked back to the bike, and lifted the helmet. The phone rang. Dang caller ID. I walked over and picked up. “What?”
“You, little girl, are not human. And I have the security tape.”
I chuckled. “Reach. I
“Not blackmail. Self-protection. I don’t know what you are, but if I feel threatened, this will go viral so fast that cheap, pixeled-out video of you carrying a dead cop out of a cave will look like child’s play.”
My past was always coming back to haunt me, ghosts of the dead. I had nearly died killing off a whacked-out family of vamps in a closed gem mine in the Appalachian Mountains. I had survived but hadn’t been able to save the cop. Another failure I carried on my shoulders. A camper had caught the video on his camera as Molly and I exited the cave, the dead cop over my shoulder. “I’m not your enemy, Reach. But Leo would be, should I tell him you’re monitoring his incoming and outgoing calls. For now, let’s just call it even. I’ll keep your secrets. You keep mine.” I hung up again and got on the bike. The phone rang again as I rode away. I didn’t look back.
I rode back to Seattle, taking in the sights as the clouds grew more ominous overhead and rain started to spit down in hard, widely spaced drops. The buildings were a charming mixture of new and old, towering and modest- height, nestled into the terrain as if they’d been tossed and landed where happenstance chose. The pace of life here, this late at night, was leisurely, with only moderate traffic and no sense of urgency.
The Space Needle was amazing, and Beast peeked out to get a good look, snarling,
Underneath the usual white-man smells of modern life, Seattle smelled of fish, stone, raw wood, and green earth. It smelled of rain—lots of rain—tropical-forest quantities of rain—and freshwater lakes and the Pacific Ocean and a sense of freedom I hadn’t expected. Though part of that might be from getting out from under Leo’s and Bruiser’s and even Reach’s thumbs. Unless I gave them opportunity, like with the pay phone call, they couldn’t find me tonight without a lot of work and a lot of luck. I stopped for gas and washed more blood, now dry, off my boots. It ran in thin trails across the pavement.
Near the Fisherman’s Terminal, at the wharf, I found a coffee shop still open and wheeled the bike in. I got an extra-large chai latte and a big blueberry scone and pulled out the laptop I’d stolen from the vamp house. I went online and did some research into flights out of the city. There were plenty of commercial red-eyes leaving, heading east, but nothing direct to New Orleans until morning. I’d be getting in near ten. I needed to be there a lot sooner, but I had no choice. I booked a direct flight with one stop, but no flight change, which cost me over five hundred dollars, but I didn’t quibble, and—not able to use cash for a flight since 9/11—I used the one credit card I was pretty sure no one knew about. I borrowed the coffee shop’s phone and left a message at the shot-up airport where the borrowed bike would be, then rode the bike to Sea-Tac, Seattle Tacoma International Airport, and left it in short-term parking with a hundred-dollar bill in the saddlebag.
With two hours left until my six a.m. flight to New Orleans, I cleaned up in the ladies’ room and ate in a terminal restaurant that served overpriced, overcooked, undertasty food. I settled in for a long night. Having brooded myself into a total funk, I pulled out the fancy, heavy cotton envelope and turned it over. My name was on the front in a flowery, curlicue, old-fashioned script that looked like calligraphy. Old vamps had the best penmanship. They’d had centuries to perfect it. Whoever had written the two words had managed to imbue my name with elegance and menace, or maybe that was just me projecting. Or maybe it was the spot of bloodred wax sealed with the imprint of a bird with a human head, maybe an Anzu.
Sniffing the envelope, I detected a faint blood-scent: peaty, spicy, and a little beery—the now-familiar blood- scent of the vamp who drained the first mate. It was an odd scent for a vamp. Even without being in Beast form, I knew it was the same vamp who had sent my attacker in Asheville, and all the ones since.
Deflecting a spurt of apprehension, I slit open the envelope and pulled out the single sheet, unfolded and scrutinized it. The words were oddly capitalized, like the way old English words were capitalized in documents to indicate their importance. Again, it was written in the calligraphy of someone who had written in script back when that was a prized skill.
Ramondo Pitri was the name of the blood-servant I’d killed in Asheville. He had come into my hotel room, carrying a gun with a silencer, and smelling of unknown vamp. I had shot him, killed him, before I ever knew that he was a made man out of New York, not the usual vamp fodder. He hadn’t smelled like any vamp I knew, or been formally attached to any of Leo’s clans. All that had caused us to assume he was a hired killer. But as an Enforcer, Ramondo should have been known to the general vamp population and should not have entered any other master’s territory without proper papers or an invitation. And he should have stunk of his master’s blood and been deeply under the blood-bond, rather than smelling of a distant and irregular feeding. Of course, I was an Enforcer—sort of—and I had no blood-bond at all.
I turned the paper over as if looking for clues that simply were not there. I had killed another master’s Enforcer and now I had to die? And Leo had to die? And the blood-slave at the Sedona Airport had to die? And the pilot stuck to the wall of a jet had to die, as did the drained corpse of the first mate? All because I . . . what? Shot first and asked questions later?
The grief I had given into on the harrowing bike ride receded a pace, leaving a small blank slate of uncertainty on my soul. Grief, like guilt, may not always be warranted.
I folded the letter back into the envelope. I needed a cup of strong tea, but there was nothing in the airport except teabags, so I walked to a bar and ordered a pint of Guinness Draught, not because I could get a rush out of the alcohol—skinwalker metabolism is too fast for that—but because I wanted something in my hands to help me think. Holding the big glass, I sipped.
The taste brought Beast to the forefront of my mind again.
