I hid my grin until after he’d disappeared into the hallway. A few moments later, the shower turned on. It was all so... domestic. I shook my head and returned to my yoga routine.
By the time Rans wandered into the kitchen some twenty minutes later, I was seated at the table with a bowl of cereal and milk. I gestured at him with my spoon.
“You know,” I said, pausing to swallow, “I’m still half-expecting to have a massive food allergy reaction, but I’m doing this anyway based on your say-so. Do you have any idea how long it’s been since I’ve had a bowl of cornflakes with milk?”
“I wasn’t aware it was the sort of thing one marked on the calendar,” he said, “but I seriously doubt any common human foods have the power to do you much damage when you’re topped off on sexual energy.”
“I’m going to eat cheesecake,” I enthused, still pointing at him with the spoon. “Chocolate cheesecake. Just as soon as I can find some. That, and pizza. With ham and pineapple.”
He looked mildly queasy. “Not at the same time, I hope.”
I raised an eyebrow, suddenly curious. “Can you eat normal food?” I asked. “Or just blood and the occasional glass of merlot?”
He shrugged. “I can. That is to say, nothing horrible happens if I do. Not much point, though. It mostly tastes like sawdust to me now.”
My face fell. “I’m sorry. That sucks.”
A half-smile twitched at his mouth. “‘Sucks’? And you call me the comedian. Really... more vampire jokes at this ungodly hour of the morning?”
I winced a bit and shook my head. “Purely unintentional, I assure you.”
“As all the best puns are. Now, finish your frosted sawdust flakes and cow juice, so we can get going.”
I nodded. “Okay. Going where, exactly?” I asked before returning to the bowl of sugarcoated cereal.
“To talk to the conspiracy theorists who run the Weekly Oracle,” he said.
My brow furrowed. “What’s the Weekly Oracle?” I asked, making a half-assed attempt to cover my full mouth with one hand as I spoke.
“Underground newspaper,” he replied. “We’ll visit their office for a chat.”
I swallowed and cleared my throat. “And how does an underground newspaper help with finding where my dad’s been taken?”
“The thing about conspiracy theorists is that they often stumble onto valuable information without having the faintest clue what it really means,” he said.
I hesitated. “I was one, you know. All my life, really.”
He looked interested. “A conspiracy theorist?”
“Yes. In fact, I guess I’ve recently become even more of one, although it’s faeries and demons now, rather than Illuminati and freemasons.”
He huffed a breath that might have been a chuckle. “It hardly counts as a conspiracy theory when it’s true.”
I gave him a sour look. “And it’s not paranoia when they really are out to get you,” I shot back. “I’ve been telling myself that all week.”
“Indeed it isn’t,” he agreed.
I spooned up the last of the soggy cornflakes and drained my glass of juice. “Right. So, are we coming back here afterward?”
“As it stands now, we will,” he said. “It’s a good base of operations.”
“But that could change if someone notices us while we’re out and about,” I hazarded. “Got it.”
Rans nodded agreement. “Exactly. Shall we go?”
I looked at my dirty dishes, not wanting to risk Tom and Glynda returning to find someone else’s milk dregs congealing in their sink if we ended up having to bug out. “Let me clean up first. No reason to be the worst house sitters ever.”
He turned an amused eye on me. “When it comes to house sitters, you get what you pay for. And we’re not being paid.”
“We also hypnotized the homeowners into needing house sitters in the first place,” I pointed out. “Come on—it’s only a juice glass and a cereal bowl. I’ll wash. You can dry.”
* * *
The offices of the Weekly Oracle were about what you’d expect for an underground conspiracy rag. Rans parked Glynda’s Ford Focus a few blocks away. We walked along the breezy Chicago streets, discarded plastic bags and other trash blowing around us in a dizzying aerial ballet.
The building that housed the newspaper wasn’t derelict, precisely, but it was pretty obvious that the objects of our interest weren’t paying high-dollar rent on the place, either. Some of the windows on the ground level were boarded up, and efforts to paint over the ubiquitous graffiti tags on the walls appeared to be few and far between.
There was a small sign hanging over the only door that didn’t have a “No Entry” sign plastered across it. An arrow indicated that the paper’s offices were in the basement.
“Underground newspaper,” I quipped. “Right.”
“Some clichés are clichés for a reason,” Rans said, opening the door and ushering me inside.
I was more than a little skeptical of what these people were likely to be able to do for us, but I also knew painfully well that I was out of my depth. It wasn’t as though I had a ready-made list of suspects to question about my father’s whereabouts.
The usual avenues—the normal things you were supposed to do when someone went missing—were no longer available to me. Calling the cops would be the same as standing under a flashing neon arrow saying, ‘Come and get me, faeries!’ I could try hiring a private investigator, but if I told them the truth about what was happening, they’d probably laugh in my face.
So, conspiracy theorists it was.
We trekked down a utilitarian stairwell that opened into a cavernous, mostly unfinished space. Some effort had been made to divide it into different areas using battered beige screens of the
