plastic strap.
When his struggles finally ceased, I rolled him over and retrieved the portable pillow, folding it into eighths and stuffing it into my pocket. I jumped backward as the third eye opened on his forehead. Unlike Wu’s regular eyes, it was colored light green. I waited, but nothing wafted out of it. It stared at the ceiling, empty and sightless as the originals.
“Where are you, Wu?” I whispered. Then I realized I’d never seen the soul of the first reaver I’d killed either. Which meant . . . “Reaver’s can’t kill anybody who’s not marked. But when they enter a body, the soul leaves. So these people, these reaver-hosts, must agree to the whole idea up-front.” Cole was right. Wu wanted to be a reaver. Samos must have made the life seem awful damn appealing. Godlike, even. With power over life and death. No pesky morals to hold you back. And the benefits package! “But at what cost? Where’s his soul now?” I had a pretty good idea, actually, but I decided right then and there never to breathe a word of it to Shao.
I hid the body behind the screen. Surveying the room again, I thought how handy it would be to pull up a floorboard under some random closet and find Pengfei and/or Lung ripe for the staking. But I didn’t sense a single vampire aboard.
I yanked open the closet doors and stifled a yelp. A row of white Styrofoam heads covered with wigs stared at me from the shelf. Just for a second I’d thought they were real.
I grabbed a medium-sized carpet bag with a gold clasp from the closet and filled it with the long-braid wig, which had been shoved behind the others and probably wouldn’t be missed, along with a few of Pengfei’s vanity supplies and a fan. With Lung’s clothes and the bag in hand I left the room. Though I badly wanted to take the shortest route back to the speedboat, when I passed the stairs that led up to the pilothouse I stopped, considered the huge gaps in my knowledge, and decided to take a detour.
As I’d expected, an actual captain inhabited the pilothouse during this, my second visit.
“Excuse me, sir. I thought I saw Xia Wu come this way.” I held up the dry-cleaning. “He told me to bring this to Chien-Lung’s quarters, but I got lost. Your ship is so massive!” Ladies, for future reference, when speaking with nautical men, ship equals private parts. The captain melted like chocolate in my hands. “Anyway, I wanted to tell him I realized we didn’t get the stain completely out of this robe, so I’d like to take it back and reclean it for free. I can have it done first thing in the morning.”
“I am afraid that will not be possible,” the captain said in British-accented English as he gave me a come-sit- on-my-lap smile. “We are leaving port this evening.”
“Oh, no! Are you going right away? Because I can take it straight to the store to clean and have it back here in a couple of hours.”
He rose from his chair and sauntered over to me, which was when I realized he resembled Sulu from the old Star Trek series. I’d always thought Sulu was kind of hot, so it was easier to make the flirty face when he said, “Actually, we’re not scheduled to weigh anchor until midnight. In fact, my employers said not to expect them aboard until after ten. So why don’t you bring the dry-cleaning back around seven, and you and I can have a late supper?”
Well, it looked like I could cross the yacht off my list of potential Pengfei hideouts. At least I wouldn’t have to worry about her returning and missing the goodies I’d stolen. If I’d given it a second’s thought, I’d have realized she and Chien-Lung, having already cleaned up after the tent fire, would feel no need to return to the yacht when they rose to repeat the process. Wherever they were, their evening’s adventures would begin as soon as their eyes opened. Which meant I needed to get the hell back to shore.
I looked around the pilothouse, not having to act impressed at the blue-lit instrument panel. “Wow, supper on a real yacht? That would be amazing!”
He leaned in. “And bring your bikini. Maybe we’ll just have dessert in the hot tub.”
Which was when he went too far. I wouldn’t even take a dip with Sulu, and he was genuinely cute. “Thanks, that would be great!” I looked out the window. “Oh, there’s my ride!” I pointed to Cole and waved, as if he could see me. Then I waved at Captain Sulu and ran down the steps that would lead me to the lower deck and the speedboat home.
CHAPTERTHIRTY-ONE
Even if I get Alzheimer’s I will never forget the sight of Bergman huddled over his work. It’s one of my first memories of him. I’d made friends with a girl in English Lit named Lindy Melson. She and her roommate, a grad student named Miles, needed some help with the rent. When she showed me the place, the first thing I saw when she opened the apartment door was Bergman hunched over the white Formica counter, fixing the toaster so it would sound an alarm when the waffles were done.
“Miles,” I said as I walked into the RV and saw him bent over the table, “what’s up?”
“Not your bullet, that’s for sure.” He sat back and rubbed his eyes with the knuckles of both hands, a sure sign of high-end stress.
“Where’s Cassandra?”
“Bathroom, running water over the
I sat down across from him.
“Don’t—”
I held up my hands.
“—touch the stuff.”
I scooted over until I was right next to him.
He looked down at me suspiciously. I put my head on his shoulder, breathed him in, and felt myself begin to unfold. After a kill, it’s always hard for me to get back to real. In the six months I’d worked solo . . . Well, let’s just say this was the safest way I’d found to reground. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“You mean besides the fact that I need my entire lab to build something this intricate?”
“Yeah, besides that.”
He moved, forcing me to look at him. “Jaz, you want a bullet hard enough to penetrate but soft enough to
