Her eyes narrowed. “You’re her attorney? I thought you said you couldn’t come in until morning.”
Betsy Blythe had already called back. That was a good sign. Maybe Kane’s faith in her was justified.
I decided to ignore the receptionist’s question—no point in lying to the police unless absolutely necessary— and responded to her statement instead. “If I waited until morning, there’d be no point, would there? Vampires sleep during the day.” Juliet was old for a vampire, with all of the powers age conferred. She could stay up half the day if she wanted, but most vampires conked out as soon as the sun cleared the horizon.
The receptionist considered, then shrugged. “Sign in here,” she said, turning an open book toward me. “I’ll need to search your bag.”
As she opened my purse, I scrawled a signature that could be anything from
“No weapons allowed in the cells. I’ll give you a receipt for this knife.” She removed a bronze dagger and set it on her desk. “And this one.”
The second dagger made her raise an eyebrow. But both eyebrows went up when the third dagger, the one in my boot, set off the metal detector. I handed it over. “Jesus, how many blades do you carry?” She crossed out the number she’d been writing on my receipt.
“I’m, um, taking a self-defense class.”
“Can’t be too careful in the Zone, right?” I added.
“Well, that’s true. I never go to any of the monster bars. I walk straight between work and the checkpoint. And the place still creeps me out.” She handed me a ticket. “I’ll get a guard to escort you to the prisoner. Use this to reclaim your weapons on the way out.” She handed me a slip of paper, which I stuffed into my purse.
The uniformed guard was also human—six two, buzz cut, with shoulders that might even give him an edge in a wrestling match with a zombie. He jerked his head to indicate I should follow. We went down a hallway and turned a corner. I waited while he removed a ring of keys from his belt and sorted through them to open a metal door. Near the end of another long hallway he stopped and again went through his keys. He opened a door and gestured me inside.
“Fifteen minutes,” he said.
I went in. The door shut and locked behind me.
Juliet sat on a narrow cot, on top of a scratchy-looking beige blanket. She was thin. Not concentration- camp-victim thin, but she’d lost her voluptuousness. Her elbows looked knobby in the short-sleeved orange prison shirt. Her long black hair was stringy and lusterless.
This was not the Juliet I knew. My Juliet had made Romeo fall in love with her at first sight more than six centuries ago. Since then, countless others had fallen for her sultry gaze, the curve of her mouth, her effortless allure. This Juliet looked frail, like the years (if not yet the centuries) were catching up with her.
If she was surprised to see me, she didn’t show it. I wanted to hug her, but she made no move toward me. Just a steady stare.
There was a chair against the wall by the door. I sat in it.
“Hi,” I said. “Orange is so not your color.”
She pressed her lips into a tight, tiny smile—a vampire’s smile. “They told me this style doesn’t come in black.”
We stared at each other. Juliet’s face was as still and unblinking, as if carved from marble.
My questions tumbled out all at once. “So what’s going on?” I asked. “Where have you been? Who are the Old Ones? What the hell happened in Washington?”
She said nothing but shifted on her cot, crossing her legs. A chain rattled. A silver shackle was locked around her right ankle, connected to thick links of silver chain that coiled on the floor and disappeared under the bed. Around the shackle, her skin was mottled purple and black, covered with large blisters. That had to hurt.
Juliet flicked a glance toward a corner of the room, behind me. I turned in my chair to see a mounted video camera winking at us rhythmically with its red eye. The room was probably bugged, too. So much for lawyer-client privilege. Not that any such thing existed for us monsters.
“Are they treating you okay?” I asked.
Juliet sniffed. “I turned myself in to get protective custody. That means they’re supposed to keep moving me to different facilities, not leave me here chained to the wall like some pathetic Andromeda waiting for the sea monster.” She rattled the chain. It looked long enough to let her move around the cell. Not that there was anywhere to go in the eight-by-ten room. “If they don’t torture me to death with silver, they’ll drive me insane with that camera. The way it’s always blinking, blinking, blinking. I can’t ignore it.” As a predator, Juliet’s vampire senses were hyperalert to any movement. She could probably see the pulse of the recording light even through closed eyelids. “Or else they’ll starve me with diluted blood.” She wrinkled her nose. “They serve it cold. In a bottle.”
Blood loses vitality when it leaves the body, and vampires need living blood to thrive. The Goon Squad should know that. But obviously they didn’t care. They were giving Juliet enough nourishment to keep her alive, but weak. She’d be easier to handle that way. “I’ll see if there’s anything Kane can do.”
“Why didn’t he come? I asked for him specifically.”
“He said . . .” I looked around, wondering where they’d hidden the microphone, and didn’t finish.
How the hell were we supposed to have any kind of meaningful conversation? There was so much to talk about, but nothing we could say, given the circumstances. We went back to staring at each other.
Coming here to talk with Juliet had been a bad idea. In the morning, her real lawyer would show up. There might be trouble for Juliet because I’d dropped by tonight. And I hadn’t gotten an answer to even one of my million-and-two questions.
So much for helping my roommate.
At least I could try to play lawyer, then get advice from Kane. What would he be asking if he were here?
“Have any specific charges been brought against you?” I asked, trying to sound like I knew what I was doing.
Instead of answering, Juliet gasped. “What on earth?” She was looking over my shoulder, toward the camera.
I twisted around. It took me a moment to realize what she’d seen. There was no blinking from the video camera. Its light had gone dark.
Out in the hallway, something crashed, making the cell’s cement floor shudder. The crash was followed by a protracted scream, a sound twisted with unfathomable fear and pain.
I jumped up and went to the door. There was no knob on the inside. We were trapped. More crashes, more bangs shook the cell. Maybe whatever stalked the hallway wasn’t looking for us. Maybe it would pass us by.
I held my breath and waited.
A blow from outside jarred the door. So much for passing us by.
Behind me, Juliet made a strangled sound. “It’s them,” she whispered. “They’ve found me.” She looked wildly around the cell. Her gaze landed on me, darkened with something like sorrow. “I’m sorry, Vicky,” she whispered.
Her words chilled me more than the scream had. Vampires never apologize—ever. Not even as a figure of speech.
Another blow bulged the door inward.
I reached into my purse for a knife—and pulled out my weapons-check receipt. Stupid visitors’ policy. I picked up the chair I’d been sitting in and lifted it over my head, pressing myself as flat as I could against the cinder-block wall beside the door. When whatever was on the other side rushed into the room, I’d knock the crap out of it.
With a screech of tearing metal, the door was ripped from its hinges. A robed figure sped through the doorway. I slammed the chair down on him, and he collapsed in a heap of black cloth.
Right behind him came a second one, this one in a brown robe. He flew—literally flew—over the first, straight at Juliet.
Juliet sat perfectly still, her hands folded in her lap, her face expressionless except for the terror that screamed silently from her eyes.
What the hell was wrong with her? Why wasn’t she fighting?
She didn’t move, didn’t even flinch, as the brown-robed creature lifted her from the bed.
