“If I talk to her, who’ll know?” I asked.
“Me,” he said, “and you. Mel will be safe. No one will know about this but us.”
“And whomever wanted the vampire to get caught, to talk to you,” I said. “What if they’re pulling me away?”
“I’ll have men in front of Derek’s house. Trained men with pacts. Mel will be safe.”
“Shit,” I said, rubbing my head. The ache had returned, this time much deeper, as if someone had shoved a thorn into the stem of my brain.
Two straight years of dedicating every second I had to finding Callie’s killers, followed by five years of trying to abandon and hide from my previous life. Now, Xander had something that could possibly change everything.
I scratched the side of my nose. “Let me get a shower real quick, then you can buy me a breakfast burrito. I’m starving.” I looked across the room, to the still-dripping wall. “Another coffee sounds good, too.”
3
“Won’t lie to you,” I said, crossing a downtown Sacramento street and walking up to Xander’s building. Two homeless men sat near the front door of the offices. “I’m a little nervous.”
Xander had allowed me one stop on the way over. I chose America’s staple fast-food restaurant for breakfast and coffee. After receiving the greasy bag from the drive-through window, he hadn’t allowed me to open it in his fancy car.
“Crumbs,” he had said. “Grease. Leather seats. The smell.”
I had to resist rubbing the hash browns all over his precious dashboard.
We approached the building—a run-down detective agency wedged between a hair salon and a martial arts studio. It had a sign that was missing most of the letters in the title. Graffiti marked the bricks and bars covered the windows.
The two homeless men who sat under the awning off to the side of the front door drank from a brown bag. How cliché, right? For a reason, though. When in doubt, play the stereotypes. Some habits die hard, and despite my retirement and inability to spot Xander’s trail, I still noticed more than the average person. Both men wore tattered, dirty clothes that reeked of vomit and urine, but beneath the stench emanated a pleasant, fragrant smell—much like deodorant and cologne. One man wore his sweatshirt’s hood up, but it didn’t disguise his clean-shaven face. The other man didn’t even bother to hide his perfectly-cut hair that he had styled messily for the character. The sour stench of cheap whiskey didn’t spill from the brown bag. Instead, I caught the heavy, beautiful fragrance of coffee. They regarded us for a second, then returned to their morning brew.
A security guard moseyed around the perimeter of the shoddy building—one hired from a cheap agency as a body and a set of eyes. With only her taser gun as a weapon, she wouldn’t have been able to stop a litter of pup werewolves from breaking into the office, but that wasn’t the point. I’m sure the company had hired her to play a role, same as the not-homeless men played their role—to appear so cliché and stereotypical that the office blended into the background noise of the city. No one would take a second look at this place as they rushed on by.
“Nervous about what?” Xander asked.
We stood before the front door as I inhaled my sausage breakfast sandwich and guzzled my coffee. The sun burned through the morning cloud cover and shined on us. With the cool breeze and cool cement, the warmth felt downright heavenly. The food had also abated my hangover symptoms, apart from my roiling stomach. Maybe after I found a toilet, today wouldn’t end up too bad.
With a mouthful of hash browns, I said, “First off, I’m a little nervous that you’re disguising your security as homeless.” I glanced down at the two men. They made a point to ignore me. “That’s never a good sign. But more, I’m a little nervous to be back in the game.”
Xander glanced at the men sitting against the bricks and shook his head. He reached into his wallet, removed a crisp ten, and handed it to the closest man. “Breakfast is on me.” Returning his attention my way, he said with a tight voice, “You’re not back in it. You had that opportunity, but you refused.” He gestured toward the greasy food bag I carried. “You done with that?”
“Well, standing on this sidewalk before this door, beside these two idiots… it’s closer than I ever thought I’d get again. I haven’t so much as said the word ‘monster’ since moving out of town.” I took another bite, swallowed without hardly chewing, and threw back the rest of my burnt coffee. “Here.” I tossed my trash at the two security men. “Make yourselves useful and throw this away.”
“I’m sorry,” Xander said to them, though he didn’t make me pick up my trash and throw it away myself.
He opened the door to a dusty waiting room and a bell chimed. Green cotton chairs wrapped around one corner of the room, all facing a receptionist desk that held a fake plant and a jar full of hard candy. In the center of the waiting room stood a table stacked with magazines. What did I tell you? Cliché is invisible. Stick to the norm and you’ll blend in like a raindrop in the ocean.
A young man, probably in college, sat behind a computer screen. He glanced up at us when we entered. He had wide, blue eyes and dark hair that was already receding, despite his youth.
“Mr. Shells,” the receptionist said with a fake smile.
“Good morning, Chris. Any calls?”
“A few. I
