Rans let his head fall back against the edge of the bed for a moment, his eyes slipping closed. When he opened them, the fiery glow behind them had faded to its usual pellucid blue. “Let’s hope so,” he agreed.
“I guess all we need now is a plan,” I said, feeling my own exhaustion tugging at me.
“Right,” he murmured. “Yes. A plan. We’re holed up in the single most obvious place that anyone who knows Guthrie would think to look for him, and in order to move, we’d need to transport an unconscious vampire who might awaken at any time with a crazed desire for human blood.”
I tried to kick my battered brain cells into gear. Rans’ motorcycle was probably still parked in the underground garage, but that was no real help to us under these circumstances.
“Does Guthrie have a car?” I asked. “He must have one, right?”
“He does, but it’s a convertible with no back seat, and a boot that’s barely large enough to accommodate a set of golf clubs.”
I blinked. “We are not stuffing him in the trunk of a car,” I said, before adding as an afterthought, “Wait. Guthrie plays golf? Seriously?”
“Only with great reluctance, I gather,” Rans replied, presumably in response to the question about golf. “It’s expected in his sort of social circles.” He sighed and straightened his spine, vertebrae popping audibly. “So, who do we know in St. Louis that we trust enough to call?”
“Len,” I replied without thought, and immediately felt guilty over the prospect of dragging the poor guy back into the middle of our shit-storm.
“Fair enough,” Rans said.
He rummaged in a pocket and came up with his phone, which he handed to me. I stared at it, trying to call up Len’s number from memory and drawing a complete blank.
“Erm...” I began.
“You copied the important numbers from my phone in Chicago,” Rans told me. “I took the liberty of doing the same with yours.”
I relaxed. “Gotcha. Good plan, that.” Not that there had been many important numbers on my phone to copy. Len’s and my father’s, basically—and Dad’s wouldn’t do much good to anyone now that he was stuck in Hell.
I scrolled through the contacts and pulled up Len’s number, then hit ‘call.’ The phone rang. After the sixth ring, it picked up.
“Yeah? Who’s this?”
“Len? It’s Zorah.” I swallowed, wetting my lips. “I’m sorry to call out of the blue like this, but we’re kind of in a bind...”
A pause. “Zorah? Yeah, I’m... uh...” Another pause—longer this time. “Look I... I’m sorry, Z. I can’t... do this right now.”
The line went dead as Len hung up. I called the number again, but it went straight to voicemail. It didn’t seem like there was much point in leaving a message.
“I did try to tell the bloke that he should let me erase his memories,” Rans muttered, having been eavesdropping with the benefit of supernatural hearing.
I winced. Okay. So apparently we’d succeeded in breaking Len’s brain last time.
Awesome.
“Any other local contacts on your end?” he asked.
I wracked my brain for anyone who was relatively well disposed toward me, and hadn’t been corrupted by the Fae when Caspian had come after me the first time. Sad as it was, there was really only one name on the list.
“Maybe,” I said, just hoping that I could remember her number.
TWO
VONNIE MORGAN HAD been at the Missouri Mental Health Alliance office on the day Caspian had shown up and turned my boss and the company board of directors against me. But she hadn’t been in the actual room when it happened, and she’d acted normal enough when I ran past her in tears—asking if I was all right, and appearing upset.
I hadn’t spoken to her since, and I’d ditched my phone for a burner shortly thereafter. Unlike Len, however, I’d had a casual friendship with Vonnie for quite some time before my entire life blew up in my face. I wasn’t entirely sure what a single mom, barely scraping by with two jobs, might be able to do to help us, but it wasn’t as though our options were all that thick on the ground right now.
She and I had called and texted each other enough that I was fairly confident of her number, even though I hadn’t transferred it to my new phone. At least, I was fairly confident right up until I got the message informing me in cool tones that the number was no longer in service.
“Damn it.” I set the phone on the floor next to me and thought hard. “I could try sending her an email, I guess.”
Rans nodded absently. “You can borrow Guthrie’s laptop. It’s probably in the office. Just make certain to use an offshore VPN, and register a fresh throwaway email account to send it. Yours could conceivably be under surveillance.”
I examined his face, taking in his haggard appearance and the way the lines around his eyes had deepened. Outside, the sun had risen to a mid-morning slant through the windows.
“That’s all I’ve got as far as trustworthy local contacts, I’m afraid,” I confessed. “How long has it been since you slept? You look worse than I feel, and that’s saying something.”
He shrugged off the words and clambered to his feet. “Even if I could remember the answer to your question, I suspect it would only upset you.”
I handed him his phone and accepted his hand up. Once I was on my feet, I used the light grip to pull him into an embrace—gratified when he melted into the contact after only the barest hesitation. Though I was taking comfort as much as giving it, I made myself ease back from him after a minute.
“Are you still reasonably confident that Guthrie will be out cold for a while?” I asked.
“With the sun up and him just starting to recover from the blood craze, he should be,” Rans said tiredly. “There’s
