my as—my backside.”
I just grinned.
Inside my house, the kitchen was clean, the dishes—including the ravioli bowl—were washed and left to dry on a towel by the sink, and Alex was hooking something up to the back of the television in the living room. Only it wasn’t my TV, but a large, flat screen that hadn’t been there before. It was perched on a drop-leaf table I vaguely remembered seeing upstairs, and electronics were scattered across its top: black, gray, and silver boxes, wires, an ergonomic keyboard, and squares of tightly folded paper instructions, which the Kid hadn’t needed to read.
“How much?” Eli demanded.
The Kid glanced up, just now seeing us. He had no security consciousness about him at all. We could have been two ninja attackers or even a couple of Angus steers, and I didn’t think he’d have noticed us enter. “Less than two grand.”
Eli took a breath to yell, I took one to laugh, and the Kid forestalled us both by adding, “I called George Dumas.” He went back to work, his attention on the spiderweb of cables he was constructing.
My stomach took a rolling tumble and I managed to inhale. George was well enough to be taking calls. “And?” I said, sounding almost normal.
“Mr. Dumas approved the preliminary estimate as a start-up to replacing the security system lost by the Master of the City in the fire that took out his house. He gave me all the necessary passwords and I’ll rebuild it from here, tie it in to the system at the Vampire Council Building, the system at the heir’s home out back, and eventually move the operating system to the Pellissier Clan Home when it’s reconstructed.” He glanced up. “Oh. I e-mailed him the prelim estimate on your company’s letterhead. You know, since we work for you now. Not trying to undercut you or anything.”
Eli and I had both stopped speaking, watching the brainiac work. I looked at Eli. Several things to say flashed through my head and I settled on “I don’t have a letterhead.” Which was stupid but better than some other options.
The Kid opened a new coil of cable, watching us from beneath his too-long bangs. “You do now. Your business name’s not real catchy, but the blurb line is. Yellowrock Security. Protecting and staking vamps—we do it all. Have Stakes, Will Travel.”
I laughed out loud. Eli did his soft chuckle. “I just
“Sure we are. The three of us.” He looked back and forth between us, suddenly confused at our reactions. “We make a great team,” he insisted. He pointed at me. “You can’t construct an extensive security system all by yourself. You’d have to hire help. Me. You need someone to handle the recon and work with extra security personnel, someone who can do everything from general construction to electrical work, to defusing a bomb. There he is. You’ve got the cash and connections we need to get started, only my brother’s too ethical to steal your business out from under you. You’re also more than human and are reported to heal fast, move fast, and fight like a demon. Perfect team.
“Oh. All that research on your security team and vamps is printed out, collated, and stacked at your door, as well as e-mailed.” As if dismissing us, the kid bent over and started moving the electronic thingamajig boxes around on the old table. Eli watched, his lips pursed, mild confusion on his face.
Alex looked up at us again. “Hey. That company, Greyson Labs? I found a tie-in to vamps. It’s not a huge tie- in, but it’s there.”
I couldn’t help my smile. The kid was good. Arguably better than Reach, and even paying the outrageous fees Eli was charging me, he was cheaper than Reach. “Yeah?”
Alex stepped over and dropped to my feet, which I did not expect, and started talking. “There’s this boutique pharmaceutical company called DeAli. It, in turn, is wholly owned by a company called Allyon Enterprises, which is wholly owned by Vazquez International. Vazquez Int. also owns Greyson Labs.” His grin grew. “Greyson is the company that employed Ramondo Pitri. Greyson is also the owner of Blood-Call Inc. I traced the money up in a line, then across, and down to find it.”
I dropped slowly to the floor, bringing my face even with the Kid’s. “Blood-Call was the name on the business cards in Seattle.”
“Bingo. And Blood-Call? It’s like a—” He shot a look at his brother and changed whatever he was about to say into “Like, you know, an escort service for vamps.” At my expression, he ducked his head to hide his gratified smile. He’d discovered something important and he knew it.
“Escort service. Meaning blood-meals and dates,” I said. That seemed important, and I tried to put it all together, but there was too much going on in my brain to isolate it.
“Dates. Yeah. Riiight,” the Kid said.
“How did you figure all that out?” I asked.
“Financial market info is pretty easy to come by on publicly held companies. I’m doing a search to see if any board members in any of the companies are suckheads.”
“Publicly held companies?” Eli barked. “Government companies?”
Kid rolled his eyes. “I’m not hacking. ‘Publicly held companies’ means the general public invests in them and owns stock. They’re traded on the stock exchange and stuff. Like that. A lot of info on publicly held companies has to be freely available, if you know where and how to look.”
“And Ramondo Pitri is now tied in to Blood-Call, which caters to vamps,” I said, “and to Greyson Labs, which has something to do with medicine. And disease.”
Yeah. That was it. It was tenuous, but it felt right, the way a puzzle piece feels when you slide it into a hole shaped just for it. “If someone wanted to infect a vamp, giving him a disease through sex and dinner would be a good way, but I don’t see how a company that makes cancer drugs would also develop a disease.” I thought about that for a moment, seeing if the puzzle piece still felt right, and oddly it did.
“There are Blood-Call businesses in Seattle and Sedona and Boston,” I guessed.
“Yes, ma’am, there are. Of course there are Blood-Calls in lots of cities in the U.S., and there haven’t been takeovers in them. Yet. So I haven’t proved a tie-in.”
“Huh. I don’t know how or if it ties in either, but as a pal of mine says, I stopped believing in coincidences when I stopped believing in Santa. Not bad work, kid. Not bad at all,” I said.
I went to my room, picking up the pages as I went.
I stepped into my room and stopped. Someone had been in here. I smelled a male and a female, raw fish, tea, powdered sugar, and perfume, something expensive and light. I sniffed, parsing the scent-signatures. Deon, Katie’s three-star chef, a friend of sorts, and gayer than an entire line of chorus dancers,
The place had been dusted. The bed was made up. The cobwebs hanging from the ceiling were gone. I walked in and lifted the coverlet. Clean sheets. I bent and sniffed. The corners smelled of Deon and Christie—only the corners, which was a happy discovery. It meant they had handled my sheets, not rolled around on them, which was a mental image I really didn’t want to intrude in my psychological space. But there was a major problem. My weapons were gone.
A slow boil started somewhere in my gut, and I dropped the collated pages on the bed, walked out of bedroom, across the foyer, and into the living room. Before I could open my mouth, the Kid said, “In the ordnance room,” and pointed at the hole in the wall. I narrowed my eyes and ducked into the hollow space under the stairs. My weapons and Eli’s were laid out on the striped mattress, hung on spikes in the mortar of the rock walls, stretched out on trays on a battered bookshelf and on another table, both from upstairs. There wasn’t much room to walk, but it was . . . organized. My blades were on the new table in sheaths or laid out by blade length. The stakes were on one end, the silver-tipped ones, then the ones made of ash wood. The vial of holy water was hanging above the table surface. My guns were on the bed by size, from the M4 shotgun to the tiny derringer. Eli’s weapons and ordnance, including flashbangs and what looked suspiciously like C4 explosives, were on the other side of the bed and on the bookcase. And there was a lot of it. My hands itched to try out a garrote made to look like a bracelet.
