“We just have to go,” I told Gigi, pulling her through the front door, staying tucked within a large group moving toward the parking lot. I pulled her behind me, forcing her to walk faster.
“Iris, why are you being all weird?”
“I’m naturally weird,” I said, breaking into a sprint and tugging her along. “Come on. You can get to the Dairy Freeze a little early, get some chili cheese fries before Sammi Jo and Braelynn show up and start talking about diets.”
“Ugh.” She groaned as I unlocked the car. I kept an eye on the door of the theater, watching as the vampires moved across the pavement toward us. “I hope no one sees me riding around in this.”
I was suddenly very much on board with Gigi’s arguments against driving around in a bright yellow van. This was not the vehicle you drove when you wanted to be incognito. She slouched down in her seat while I pulled out of the lot.
I was able to relax a little once we were safely on the main drag through town. Vampires or no, Crown and Dodd weren’t going to abduct us from a street in front of dozens of other drivers. I pulled my phone from my purse and saw that I had a voicemail waiting. Gigi raised her eyebrows when I punched in my access code and listened. I was usually the one giving her “distracted driving is the moron’s equivalent to drunk driving” lectures. But I figured that fleeing from disingenuous vampire administrators called for a special exception.
The voicemail was from Ophelia. It was brief and cryptic, like most conversations with Ophelia. “Iris, I thought you’d want to know I finally tracked down a hard copy of that delivery schedule we discussed. Peter Crown was assigned to that task. Keep that in mind. Keep the information close to you. Stay where you are. I will talk to you soon.”
Mr. Crown had delivered the poisoned blood to Cal’s house? Not surprising. Ophelia managed to find this information after Mr. Crown chased us out of a Jane Austen movie? Well, that was decidedly unhelpful.
Which was also in line with most of my conversations with Ophelia.
I dialed Cal’s cell phone, but he didn’t pick up. I dialed Ophelia’s number, but I got sent to voicemail. I left her a message saying that I’d seen the gentleman we’d discussed before at the movie theater, and I hoped she’d catch up to him.
Gigi gave me a suspicious look. I offered her a grim smile but checked the rearview mirror every few minutes to see if we were being followed. Annoyed with my antics, Gigi was overeager to get out of the car when I pulled into the lot of the Dairy Freeze.
“Free at last.” She sighed.
“Have fun,” I said. “Stay here at the drive-in. Stay with the other girls. Call me if your plans change.”
“I always do,” she said.
“Hey!” I called as she closed the door. She yanked it back open. “Love you.”
“Weirdo,” she muttered, slamming the door shut.
I watched as she walked into the restaurant and took a booth to wait for her friends. I felt myself relax slightly. As long as she stayed around witnesses, Gigi was safe. Whatever strange sense of foreboding I felt now had to be defused by the knowledge that she was secure. My mind raced as I calculated my options. I waited for a few minutes and pulled out into the street. I dialed Cal’s number again but was directed to his voicemail.
“Hey, Cal,” I said. “Um, I hope I’m not blowing your cover as you’re crawling through the air ducts. I don’t know what you’re doing. But I’m really hoping you’re on your way home. Because it is your home. I know you’ve spent a good portion of your time avoiding emotional complications, but I do have them—emotions, that is. Um, if you run into Peter Crown from the Council office, I’m pretty sure he’s the one who poisoned you. I don’t have any proof, of course, but it’s a pretty good hunch.” I glanced into the rearview and saw the lights of a car staying a careful twenty yards behind me, as it had been for a few blocks. “I—I’ve got to go, but I hope I’ll see you soon. I love you.”
I tucked the cell phone into the console and commanded my hands to stay still and steady on the wheel.
“No big deal, Scanlon,” I told myself. “Sure, you’re being followed by a creepy vampire client and an undead bureaucrat who may or may not be involved in a string of vampire poisonings. And your pseudo-boyfriend is MIA. You just entrusted the safety of your baby sister to another seventeen-year-old with a history of night-vision problems. Nothing can go wrong here.”
Ophelia had told me to stay where I was. I could only assume that she thought I was at home. So I turned left onto County Line Road. The car behind me didn’t turn, leaving me alone on a proverbial dark country lane. Apparently, I wasn’t being followed.
“Shoot,” I grumbled. “I probably shouldn’t have said my first ‘I love you’ in a voicemail.”
16
Their survival instincts honed from centuries of intrigue, vampires tend to be self-interested creatures. Do not overestimate their loyalty toward you. You will be disappointed or seriously injured.
—The Care and Feeding of Stray Vampires
Remembering Cal’s instructions, I slipped my cell phone into my pocket as I trod up the porch steps. The house was just as we’d left it, living-room lights on, front door locked. I locked the door behind me and dropped my purse onto the foyer table. I’d just reached the landing when I heard someone bumping around in the living room. The footfalls were heavy, booted, the rhythm too masculine to be Gigi’s light step.
“Cal?” I called, stepping carefully down the stairs. I turned into the living room to find a strange teenage boy rifling through my writing desk. The living room had been tossed, a hurricane path of damage stretching from the door to the kitchen.
“What are you doing in my house?” I asked, carefully moving toward the door. I fished my phone out of my pocket. There was a flash of movement, and the vampire was standing nose-to-nose with me. He slapped my phone out of my hand and sent it flying. The shattered pieces of black plastic rained down at our feet.
Vampires were not kind to BlackBerrys.
He was just a boy, really, turned at eighteen or so. He was a lithe, whippet-thin kid with pale blond hair artfully arranged into stylish chaos. Everything about the pale storm-gray eyes and elegant features spoke of menace. He leaned far too close for comfort and inhaled deeply. His intense, hungry expression had me backing toward the door.
He purred. “Miss Scanlon, I need you to stay calm.”
“Who are you?”
“You can call me John. I’m just a courier, really, Iris. May I call you Iris?” he asked, offering me an ingratiating smile. Hesitantly, I nodded, but I refrained from taking the slim white hand he offered me. A ripple of disappointment flashed across his face before he settled his features into a polite mask. “It’s lovely to meet you … face-to-face, so to speak.”
He snickered as if he was enjoying some private joke. The sly laugh sent a nauseating echo through my belly.
“I need you to come with me, quickly, quietly, and without a fuss.” His voice wound its way around in my head, like cotton soaked in some sweet, cloying medicine. I couldn’t breathe. I could barely keep my head up.
“Why?” My head felt heavy. My thick tongue made it hard to form words, and I just wanted to close my eyes. Numb, I slumped against him, and he gently pushed me into a nearby chair.
“I finally caught up to your Mr. Calix. I’ve been watching your house off and on for a week, and this is the first time he’s left it alone.” He knelt in front of me, pulling at my chin so I was forced to look him in the eye. He grinned wickedly. “It was luck, you see, stupid luck. The night your vampire disappeared, I followed your scent from his place to yours. There was no sign of our Mr. Calix from the outside, not even his scent. All I got was the maddening smell of all those flowers in your garden. So I went back to Deer Haven and waited.” He trailed his fingers down my throat, to the long-healed bite mark he’d left on my skin. His fangs dropped, and he licked his lips. “And then, to stumble onto you when you returned to his home—his scent on you was so strong. I was sure he was at your house. But you were so careful to be home before dark. I couldn’t get information from you or about you. I was perplexed for days. And then, one night, I was out at a high-school football game. Large crowds are good places to find prey. And I found that scent again. Like lavender with just a hint of iron.
“Your sister was so sweet, so eager to please. And delicious. Both of you have such a delicate bouquet. It’s as if spending so much time in the garden has steeped flowers into your very skin. Every time we met, I asked her more questions to gauge how your guest’s investigation was progressing. And she was just so, mmm, accommodating.”
My mouth dropped open. What had this freak done with my little sister? When had he had time to see her? Had he fed from her? Had he hurt her? Taken advantage of her? Hot, boiling rage bubbled up in my throat, freeing my tongue enough to let me say, “I’m going to kill you. A lot.”
His grin seemed to stretch even wider at my slurred words. “There’s no need to be rude, sweet thing. Especially since we’re going to be spending so much time together after my employer takes care of your Calix. You and Gigi are going to be a sort of bonus, you see. I was afraid, after you stumbled onto the grow operation, that I’d lost you. I didn’t want to lock you in that shed with him, but I couldn’t risk him making it to the Council before I’d had a chance to collect from my employer. It pained me, the thought of wasting your blood in such a stupid, pointless manner. Leaving before I was sure that he’d finished the job was a mistake, but I just couldn’t bear to listen to you being destroyed. I would have made do with just Gigi, but … but it’s all worked out for the best, hasn’t it? You and Gigi and your delicious blood are just the sort of treat I deserve for a job well done. And when I’ve tired of feeding from you—though I can’t imagine that will happen anytime soon—I’ll turn you. And then we’ll be together forever, one big, happy family.”
The leering, dreamy quality to his voice gave me an idea of the bonding activities he had planned for that happy family. That thought was sobering enough. I pinched my arm, letting the pain bring me into some sort of focus. I shook my head and tried to concentrate on the words he was speaking, rather than his voice. “When I kill you, it’s going to involve injuries to your crotch.”
He chuckled and pinched my cheek, as if I were a charming toddler. “Well, I would love to hear about any plans you have for that particular area of my body, but my employer is eager to see you. I strung him along for weeks, lying about my progress. I wanted him to be desperate for the information about Mr. Calix. I wanted him to pay top dollar. So giving him hints was quite profitable. And Gigi proved to be so amusing I wanted it to last and last.”
He was doing something extra now; there was a musical quality to his voice. My head drooped, a heavy bloom on a weak stem. My chin touched my chest under its weight.
“Now,” he said, patting my head, “if you would wait here, I need to retrieve Mr. Calix’s files. You don’t move from this spot, do you understand? If you move or make a noise, I will be very, very upset. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”
I shook my head. It didn’t seem like such an unreasonable request, really, sitting at my own kitchen table. I smiled and folded my hands in my lap, as still as stone as he moved up the stairs. The farther he moved away, the clearer my head became, but the strange numb weight kept my arms in my lap.
I heard a car pull up outside. I wanted to call out a warning to Gigi, to spring up from the chair and run out to her, but I couldn’t move. My fingers wouldn’t even twitch. If I moved, the world would end. The ceiling would come crashing down on my head. I couldn’t even draw the breath to squeak. I just sat there, my hands clamped together.
