could remember was Kerrinan’s bitter grief over the loss of his wife. Maybe it was just an Alfar trick, or maybe he was a great actor, but he seemed to genuinely have loved Michelle.
I pulled back the edge of my glove and checked my watch. It was seven thirty p.m. and it was clear that neither Vento nor I had the patience for detailed dressage work. I nudged him forward off my leg and walked across the parking lot and over to the breezing track. I found the electrical box and flipped on the lights around the track. They didn’t help much, but it gave us a clearer sense of the edges of the track. Here, near the back of the Equestrian Center the hum from the cars on the 134 freeway was like droning deep in my chest.
We reached the center of the track and I turned Vento to face the expanse of dragged dirt. His muscles vibrated beneath me, and he began to piaffe. I wrapped my hands in his flowing mane, sent my hips forward slightly, and backed it up with a touch of my calf. He rocketed into a canter, and within three strides we were at a full gallop. He didn’t have the bounding stride or the speed of the thoroughbreds I had breezed one summer when I was looking for extra cash, but he was still going plenty fast enough for a foggy February night. And what he lacked in speed he made up for in stamina. We had circled the quarter-mile track three times before I began to feel his hindquarters losing push.
I began to reel him in. Then Vento leaped sideways, and I fought to maintain my seat. My intestinal tract seemed to be somewhere in the vicinity of my throat as I looked around wildly for what had spooked him. I spotted a dark figure vaulting over the rail and rushing toward me, hand outstretched toward the bridle. Vento took umbrage at that and went hopping backward.
The figure was now close enough that I could recognize David. “You’re not helping!” I yelled, and he put on the brakes. A second later Vento was standing quietly, though I could feel his sides heaving against my legs, and his breath sounded like a bellows. He swung his head back toward me then looked at David with what I could only interpret as disapprobation.
“Sorry, I guess I spooked him,” said the vampire.
“Do you think?”
“Sorry,” he repeated.
“Why did you run at us?”
“I thought you were in trouble … I was trying … it was stupid.”
“Agreed. Don’t you know anything about horses?”
“Not really.”
Which was another clue to the cypher that was David. He clearly wasn’t as old as many of the vampires of my acquaintance since he wasn’t conversant with horses. I turned to a more pressing question.
“What are you doing out here? And more to the point, where the hell were you yesterday?” The fog was condensing on the brim of his fedora, threatening to become actual droplets of water. His face was a pale oval in the darkness.
“I wanted to check in with you. I heard what happened in the arbitration yesterday.” I tensed waiting for a reprimand. “You did good.”
It wasn’t what I expected. “Thank you.”
“You sound surprised.”
“You guys tend to be a little stingy on the compliment front.”
“You proved yourself. It’s why I decided to help you with the Securitech case,” he said.
“Okay, I call bullshit. You started helping me as a way to get back at Ryan.” I said, laughing.
David stiffened. Vampires hate to be laughed at, but he again surprised me. “All right, that’s true, but once I started to work with you I saw your quality.”
“What exactly does quality mean?”
He gave me a quick smile. “I’m not going to pander to your vanity, and I need to keep you striving to impress me.” There was the echo of laughter in his voice
“And I need to head back to the barn.” I jerked my head behind me. “Want a ride?”
He stepped in close and put his hand on the pommel of the saddle. His arm rested against my hip. I kicked my foot out of the stirrup so he could use it. He looked up at me. I looked down at him. Then he abruptly stepped back and shook his head. “I’ll walk.” We started back toward the barns. “Your horse doesn’t seem very alarmed.”
“Not now. You’re no longer a scary, shadowy figure in the darkness.”
“Most animals object to my kind.”
“They sense you’re a predator and…” I tried to think of a more tactful way to say dead.
“Not alive,” David supplied.
“Yeah.”
“The staff reports you weren’t in the office today,” David said as we walked across the Equestrian Center.
“I was off interviewing the Human First people, and while I don’t like them I just can’t see them engineering something like this. Really wish I could talk to Jondin so I could compare her statement to Kerrinan’s.”
“Linnet, I want you to be careful with this.”
“It won’t have any effect on the arbitration.”
“That’s not what I meant. People have been killed.”
We reached the barn, I kicked loose my stirrups and jumped down, and found David’s arm closing around me to help lower me gently to the ground. “He’s not that tall,” I said, indicating the horse. “But thank you. And thanks for the concern, but our two murderous Alfar are locked up.”
“There are a lot of Alfar in Hollywood.”
“Now you sound like you’re channeling Human First.”
It felt cozy inside the barn and out of the fog and the dark. I put Vento in the tack-up area, pulled off his saddle, and began brushing him down. The smell of hay, dust, and horse was calming, and he was warm beneath my hand.
David leaned his shoulders against the tall wood divider and said, “I’ll see what I can do about seeing Jondin, but don’t expect it to work. It might be easier to get your gnome in to see her.”
I looked over my shoulder at David. “Gnome? Really? I call that tall-man bias. And I think Maslin’s a good height for a shrimp like me.”
“You make up for the lack of inches in attitude.”
I returned the dandy brush to the tack box and said carefully, “Okay, now you really are starting to freak me out with all the compliments.”
“You’re showing live-person bias.”
It wasn’t all that funny, but it still made me chuckle. “Okay, now I know you’re sick. Humor is not your strong suit.”
“Vampires in general or me in particular?”
“You in particular. You must have supped from a drunk.”
“Well, if you’re going to be insulting, I’ll leave you. See you tomorrow.”
For an instant the tall, broad-shouldered figure was silhouetted against the doorway of the barn, and then he was gone. Then I realized he never had answered the second question. So where had he been?
16
Even though intellectually I didn’t agree with Cartwright’s final words, they stayed with me. Maybe that’s what makes demagoguery work. Why had the Powers gone public? Historians argued that it was the times—the 1960s was a time of social and cultural turmoil. I wasn’t sure that held together. Sure, groups had been looking for a place—African Americans, women, gays, young people—but they were, for the most part, the disenfranchised. The Powers had a place—they were in charge. The vampires and the hounds had been pulling the strings from behind the scenes for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, and it had worked really well for them. Why reveal themselves?
I sat on the sofa in my apartment, elbows on knees, chin in hand. The winter night had crept in while I sat
