“What about others around here?”
I shake my head. “Even Gideon isn’t that old, and he wouldn’t cooperate, anyway. Besides, wouldn’t that be fraud?”
“Only in the short term.” She licks the red salt off her fingers. “It’d be like telling a lie to create a greater truth.”
“Do I know you?”
“It’s no different than what you’re doing with the vampires.”
I shake my head. “Lori, you should know by now not to use me as a role model.”
“Why not?”
The phone rings again. Needing to escape the conversation, I answer it.
“Hello, Ciara,” says Elizabeth. She pronounces it with three syllables—kee-ahr-ah—as if I’m Italian. “I wanted you to be the first to know. Due to the station’s recent success, I feel disinclined to sell it.”
“Really?” A surge of pride—or possibly heartburn— erupts beneath my ribs. “You’re giving Skywave the blow-off?”
Lori’s eyes widen, and she raises her arms in a silent Score!
“Not exactly,” Elizabeth says. “The company has become more aggressive in their buyout efforts. They’re offering me a tempting amount of money, but they want my decision sooner.”
“How soon?”
“I meet with them next Friday.”
I’m confused. “So what are you going to tell them?”
“It depends. Remember those end-of-August ad revenue goals I established?”
“Of course.” I’ve only built my entire summer around those numbers. “We’re right on target to reach them.”
“Not anymore. If you can reach those goals before my meeting, I won’t sell the station. Otherwise, I’m afraid I’ll have no choice. Their offer’s too good to turn down.”
She can’t mean what I think she means. “You want us to meet the end-of-August goals by next Friday?”
“Yes.”
“In ten days.”
“Yes.”
“That’s not fair.”
Elizabeth clicks her tongue. “Grow up, Ciara. It’s business. I have a very long future to think of.”
I sink back against the lounge chair, heat pounding my temples. “So we might have done all this work just so you can make more money?”
“Don’t worry. If I sell, I’ll make sure it trickles down to your friends. Some sort of pension arrangement should set them up nicely for a few years.”
“A few years? They’re immortal!” I check my surroundings to make sure no one heard that last part except Lori. “They need the station to keep from fading.”
“Then you make sure they don’t lose it.” She hangs up.
I slap the phone shut so hard, it flies out of my hand and skitters across the concrete.
Lori clears her throat. “That didn’t sound good.”
I stare at the clear blue sky as I bang my head against the back of the chair. I’ll give Franklin a few more minutes’ peace before I tell him we have to cram six weeks’ worth of work into ten days.
So much for being one with the sun.
19
Steal My Sunshine
“I’m considering violence,” I tell Shane as we wait in line at Legal Grounds. The crappy mandolin trio in the next room makes enough noise that no one will overhear us. “A tag team of Regina and Jim could scare the Skywave executives out of buying the station. A corpse-a-day-till-they-go-away campaign.” I hop a little on my toes. “What do you think?”
“I think you need sleep.”
“I need coffee.” I crane my neck to see the cash register. “What’s taking so long? Anyone who waits until they get to the counter to pick what they want should be sent to the end of the line.”
A gaggle of college-age girls drifts by. “Hi Shane!” they coo in unison. He offers them a friendly wave and smile. I sway enough to stumble into him.
“Sorry, so clumsy tonight. And tired.” I rest my head on his biceps until the girls have passed. Not that I feel possessive or anything.
“Like I said, you need sleep.”
“Not until the sales goals are met. Elizabeth’s meeting is in less than a week, and we’re not even halfway there. If she sells the station, Skywave’s juggernaut of soul-suckery will trample everything you and the other DJs have worked for.”
“Don’t worry.” He rubs the stiff part of my shoulder. “Sometimes just when things look hopeless, that’s when everything works out.”
“That doesn’t sound like something you’d say.”
“No, normally I’d say that when things seem hopeless, it just means you have no idea how much worse they’re about to get. But I’m trying to calm you down.” He rotates me toward the counter. “I recommend chamomile tea.”
I stagger forward and give the barista a shaky smile. “Gigante mocha, organic two-percent milk, one-and-a-half shots of coconut, no whipped cream. Please.” The last word comes out like Oliver Twist asking for more gruel.
Shane gets a black-no-sugar coffee, then I let him drive us back to the station so I can gulp my drink more quickly. He shifts gears like a natural, never racing the engine or coming close to a stall.
“After this is all over,” he says as we pull into the parking lot, “I want to take you out to dinner. Like a real date.”
“I hear people do those things.”
We get out of the car. “Maybe even a movie,” he says. “I hear they made a sequel to Wayne’s World.”
I laugh, not caring whether he means it as a joke. “Wait, you left your coffee.” I bend over inside the car to reach it.
When I straighten up and turn around, Shane is looming over me, fangs bared. His hand covers my mouth, cutting short my shriek.
A cold presence seeps across my skin, making me shiver. Oh God, all along it was Shane.
I squeeze the coffee cups in fear, sending hot liquid down the front of my shirt.
Then I realize he’s looking over my head into the woods. His nostrils flare and his jaw trembles. “Something’s out there,” he whispers, dropping his hand from my mouth.
“It’s what I felt before.”
Suddenly Shane jerks his head to look behind him, a moment before a spark of white light flashes from the other end of the parking lot, followed by a very human-sounding profanity.
A beastly growl rumbles deep in Shane’s throat. Footsteps pound away toward the back of the building. Shane takes off in swift and silent pursuit.
As I follow them, I hear the muffled sounds of a struggle, topped off by a metallic bang. Then Shane calls, “I got him.”
I tiptoe around the corner of the building and see Shane crouched next to the Dumpster, poring through a leather wallet. A dark-haired young man with a mustache lies crooked and motionless on the gravel beside him.
I step back. “You killed him.”
Shane glances at me. “Of course not. He hit his head. When he comes around, I want to know more about him than he knows about us.” He hands me the man’s digital camera. “See what pictures he has. I can’t make it work.”
I flip to the last image, which causes me to almost drop the camera. He must have taken it just before Shane grabbed him, because there’s my dude, frozen in his fanged glory, reaching toward the lens with a red rage.
“You take a scary candid.” I delete it. The next few shots are of the station, time-stamped earlier this evening. “Who is this guy?”
“Name’s Travis Tucker, according to his driver’s license.” Shane stuffs it back into the wallet and rifles through the other cards. “He belongs to Triple A, the Olive Garden frequent diner club, and a fan club for—who the hell is Jeff Gordon?”
“This Travis Tucker’s been spying on the station for weeks.” I flip faster through the old photos. “Hey, that’s not a bad shot of me in my car. I’d keep it if it didn’t give me the heebie-jeebies.”
“I think I know why he’s spying on us.” Shane hands me an official-looking card. “Because it’s his job.”
The card features the colorful ins
ignia of the State of Maryland, right above the words “Private Investigator.”
“Son of a bitch.” I squint at the fine print. “Probably shady. His license expired years ago.” I kneel beside Travis Tucker—if that is his real name—and sift through his jacket pockets, turning up a pair of sunglasses and a cell phone.
“Business cards.” Shane drops the wallet on the ground to shuffle through the stack. “Maybe one is his client.”
“Does he have any money?” Not that I would steal it.
Shane opens the billfold. “Thirteen bucks and a check.”
I try to access the cell phone’s contact list, but it’s password-protected.
“Uh-oh.” Shane hands me the check. “We’d better call the others.”
“Skywave is spying on us?”
Regina’s hair stands on end even more than usual. All the DJs except Monroe, who’s on the air, are gathered in the lounge to hear what happened.
“Where is this detective now?” Noah asks from the middle of the sofa, where he sits, arms crossed.
“In the Dumpster,” I say as I pace past him for the third time, “with a rock on the lid no human could move. We gagged him so he can’t scream when he wakes up.”
“Which should be any minute.” From his position near the door, Shane gives the clock a worried glance. “I hope.”
At the table, Regina exchanges pensive looks with Jim and Spencer. “It’s better if he doesn’t wake up,” she says quietly. “Or if he does, that he goes back to sleep forever.”
I turn to her, positive I heard wrong. “You want to kill him? In cold blood?”
“I bet it’ll be pretty warm.” Jim tilts back his chair, his bare feet propped against the edge of the card table. “Unless you already did him in.”
“We didn’t,” Shane snaps. “So let’s quit jaggin’ around and figure out what we’re really going to do about Travis.”
Regina shoves back her chair and stands up. “We have to get rid of him. It’s better that way.”
“Better for who?” Shane and I ask in unison. I’m glad he thinks they’re just as cracked as I do.
“Better for the station,” Regina replies, “better for all of us, but especially better for you.” She glares at Shane. “You could be charged with assault.”
“Assault is one thing,” I point out, “but first-degree murder is a whole other ball game.”
“Don’t worry.” Regina stretches her shoulders and neck. “You won’t have to watch. I’ll take care of it.”
“I want to help.” Jim gets up to join her. “I never killed someone on purpose before. Sounds like a trip.”
“‘A trip’?” My hands form useless fists. “You people are sick!”
“Honey, we’re not people.” Spencer follows Jim and Regina toward the door. “You keep forgetting that.”
Shane blocks their exit. “Don’t do it.”
“You think that little leech,” Regina points back at me, “cares what happens to you? She’ll get off with a slap on the wrist as an accessory, and you’ll go to jail. A jail with windows.”
For perhaps the first time, Shane pulls himself up to his full height, towering over his maker. “What did you call her?”
Regina wavers under his simmering stare. “I’m trying to protect you. That’s a hell of a lot more than she’ll do.”
“This isn’t about me.” I step forward and hold up Jolene’s business card, the one Shane found in Travis’s wallet. “I have a better idea, one that doesn’t involve bloodshed.”
“As if that’s a plus,” Regina says. “Come on, Noah.”
“Can’t we at least discuss it?” I fight to keep the panic out of my voice.
“If we let him go,” says Noah, who hasn’t moved from the couch, “Skywave will know the truth about us.” He folds his arms tighter and hunches his shoulders. “But to kill him, it’s wrong.”
“It’s not even necessary.” I hold up Travis’s camera. “I can delete the pictures.”
“There could be others,” Spencer points out.
“None of it is proof you guys are really vampires. We could say Shane put on plastic fangs for fun.”
“It doesn’t explain why he’s so fast and strong,” Jim says, “or why he had to knock this guy out to hide fake fangs.”
Shane bristles. “So I overreacted. You would’ve done the same thing.”
Jim shrugs. “No, I would’ve just killed him.”
“Right.” Regina shoves Shane aside with astounding ease. “Time to finish your half-assed job.” She reaches for the door.
I open the credenza drawer and grab Franklin’s box of sharpened pencils. I rip open the box and advance on Regina.
Before the others leap to defend her unlife, I fling the pencils, dozens of them, onto the floor. They spin and scatter across the rug and under the furniture.
Regina freezes. She stares at the pencils, then at me, with more hostility than I thought a Canadian could possess. A strangled cry escapes her throat as she fights the compulsion. Her hand tightens on the doorknob, then lets it go with a jerk.
She falls to her knees and crawls across the floor, gathering pencils and counting under her breath. Noah looks on, immobilized with indecision. Spencer and Jim shake their heads in sympathy and move toward the door.
“Don’t you dare go without me!” Regina clutches the pencils so hard, most of them snap in two. “Bugger all! Where was I? Twenty-seven or twenty-six?” Her hands shake with rage as she drops the broken pencils and sifts through them again.
I turn to the others. “Listen. If we play our cards right, we can use this guy Travis to our advantage.”
“Stop talking!” Regina is almost in tears. “I can’t concentrate.”
“If we can outwit Skywave,” Shane says, “beat them at their own game, I say let’s do it.”
The others eye him, then Regina, as if trying to determine who’s in charge.
Finally Jim shakes his head. “Too big an ‘if.’ Let’s waste the bastard.”
“Not without me!” Regina crawls under the table to retrieve the rest of the pencils. “Thirty-three, thirty-four— I’m almost done. Thirty-five—”
Jim opens the door. “What the hell?”
The detective is slumped on the bottom stairs, his head against the banister.
I step back. “It’s Travis.”
Regina blurs past me and pounces, grabbing the detective by the front of his shirt. Without waiting for him to scream or beg, she plunges her fangs into his throat. Shane moves to stop her, but before he gets there, she hurls Travis to the floor and starts to gag and cough like a cat with a hairball.
“He’s already dead.” She swabs the inside of her mouth with her finger. “Yecch. It’s like biting Jell-O.”
“No way.” Shane kneels beside Travis. “He hasn’t had time to get cold, unless he was—” He turns Travis on his side, revealing two other puncture wounds in his neck. “—drained.”
“You said you didn’t kill him,” Spencer says.
“I didn’t. I definitely didn’t bite him.” Shane looks at me. “You were there.”
True. But in the dark I might not have seen Travis’s wound.
Shane catches my dubious expression and stands to face me. “Ciara, I couldn’t have done this. There wasn’t time, and besides, I don’t kill people.”
I back away, hands out, trying to speak in a soothing voice. “You felt threatened. He fought back, right?”
“How can you believe I’d do this and then lie to you about it? Don’t you know me better than that?”
“Guys? He’s not dead.” Jim is examining Travis’s face. “Unless we stick an ‘un’ in front of it.”
He turns the man’s head to reveal a mouth full of blood. The teeth and gums are stained red like in a denture commercial.
I take a step closer. “Couldn’t that just be from—”
Travis’s eyes pop open. We all jump, but I’m the only one who screams when his fangs appear.
He starts to twitch and flop, shrieking with what sounds like pain. Jim tightens his hold on his shoulders. “Shh, don’t freak out, man. We’re here to help.”
Travis breaks out of Jim’s grip with the ease of a bat from a spiderweb. He leaps at me. I have time for one step backward before he knocks me to the ground.
“No!” My heels pedal the thin rug as I try to scramble out of his hands, one of which tightens around my waist while the other flattens my shoulder against the hard floor. Quick as a snake, his mouth slashes forward. I use my last breath to scream.
Shane’s face appears above us, his arm looped around Travis’s neck, barely holding him off me. I shove against the detective’s chest, but Shane and I together can’t match the strength of such a desperate hunger. In Travis’s watery green eyes I see that it’s a struggle for his survival against mine.
“Someone help me!” Shane shouts, but no one responds. “For fuck’s sake, she’s our friend!”
“And he’s one of us now.” Regina appears in my field of vision, arms crossed. “He needs blood.”
“He’ll kill her!” Shane’s face is red from the strain. Travis is drooling now, bloody saliva dripping onto my neck.
“Maybe not,” Spencer says. “And he’ll die if he doesn’t drink.”
“Man, that is not cool,” Jim observes, “turning someone, then leaving them to starve.”
I hurl pleading gibberish through a gurgle of tears.
“I swear,” Shane gasps, “if one of you doesn’t pull him off right now, I’ll—”
Suddenly Travis is jerked away from me. I hear a crash against the far wall, then lift my head to see Travis collapsed on the sofa, stunned.
Monroe stands next to us, looking down at Shane. He puts his hands in his pockets. “You’ll what?”
Travis lunges again, but Monroe grabs him with a deft gesture and suspends him off the ground, feet kicking. For the first time, WVMP’s oldest DJ looks straight at me.
“Run.”
I stumble to my feet and launch myself up the stairs.
At the top, I freeze, staring at the front door. Whatever killed Travis is out there.
I lock the door, grab another stash of sharpened pencils from Franklin’s desk, then scramble into David’s office.
Wicked Game Page 18