Bite Back 05 - Angel Stakes

by Mark Henwick

  “No,” Tamanny said. “He’s cool, and he’s kind. He’s always doing stuff he doesn’t have to. He buys me things.”

  She leaned back against the railing at the edge of the deck and lifted one foot.

  “Like these,” she said.

  “Blahniks.” A couple of months ago, I wouldn’t have gotten past high-heeled shoe, pretty, completely impractical, looks too freaking expensive. Jen had insisted I learn better, but I was still right: they were impractical and expensive. In fact, thanks to Jen, I now knew roughly how incredibly expensive. Tamanny’s Blahniks were lipstick red, they hugged her heels and had a sort of interlaced crossover that held the front of her foot, leaving the instep bare.

  “Yes!” Tamanny was clearly impressed with me, and pleased she could show off without having to explain it. “Aren’t they just amazing?”

  “They’re beautiful,” I said, truthfully.

  “You can take them off sometimes,” Elizabetta said. The shoes didn’t go with the casuals she was wearing.

  Tamanny pretended to stamp in anger. “No! No! No! They can pry them off my cold, dead feet.”

  We all laughed again. It was easy around Tamanny. I got the feeling she wanted to be laughing all the time.

  I’d anticipated her answer about Tanner Forsythe. He wouldn’t do the creepy bit. He’d be charming as the devil. Everyone’s heartthrob. No, he was an invisible predator. And sick. I’d bet the more surprising he could make it when he struck, the more of a thrill he’d get from it.

  “Your mom thinks he’s okay, too?”

  “Oh, yeah!” She’d relaxed again.

  Elizabetta came back into the conversation. “You mentioned friends. They live in LA?”

  “No.” Tamanny sighed. “My old friends from home.” She got jumpy again. “You gotta promise me you won’t say anything. Mom doesn’t know I keep in touch with them.”

  “She doesn’t approve?”

  “She says they’ll hold me down.”

  “Keep you grounded, more like.” Whoops. The demon in my throat slipped that out before I could stop it, but Tamanny only nodded agreement.

  “I know she only wants what’s best for me,” she said.

  I didn’t agree, but I managed to keep the demon quiet. I’d gone from wanting to meet Tamanny’s mother to wanting to have serious words with her.

  “I mean, look at all this: it’s not that bad, having to put up with the creeps,” she went on. “Sometimes you have to, y’know, like, pay in advance. Take a little hard time up front for the soft life.”

  My eukori fizzed and I got a tremor of the deep fear in Tamanny as she parroted the stuff her mother had been feeding her.

  Before I could say anything more, the woman herself arrived. In a rush, unhappy and letting us know all about it.

  “Who said you could interview her?” was her opening, delivered at the top of her voice.

  “Hello, Mrs. Harper,” Elizabetta said. “We’re not interviewing. We were just chatting and enjoying the view while we waited for you.”

  That only partially satisfied her. “No one told me. What the fuck’s going on?” She didn’t wait for an answer, reaching out to grab Tamanny. “What’ve you said to them?”

  I managed to stop myself from breaking Mrs. Harper’s arm, but the demon came up with: “That it’s a great view and she has nice shoes.”

  Elizabetta got between me and the woman. “We’re wanting to do something a bit different here, Mrs. Harper. In fact, we wanted to talk to you, as much as Tamanny. The angle we’re looking for is, well, where Tamanny comes from. That’s family, and that means you.”

  “Oh. I’m not just her mother, you know.”

  She stepped back, letting her daughter go. Tamanny rubbed her arm discreetly.

  “I’m about to re-launch my career,” Mrs. Harper said.

  I bit my lip to shut up. Elizabetta was going to be a whole lot better than me at talking to both of them.

  I had to admit, Mrs. Harper would take a good picture. I could see Tamanny had inherited her good bone structure from her mother. The woman would still have been attractive if it hadn’t been for the unnatural stillness of her face and the overelaborate makeup.

  But re-launching a career here, in LA, where youth was a god?

  “Good genes,” Elizabetta was saying. “Bone structure, carriage. You must have been in the industry as well. I mean, didn’t I read something about your work with the Bailarin Dance Group?”

  Mrs. Harper almost smiled. I wondered if there were any muscles still working in her face.

  “Yes. I was the principal. We took it to Vegas, you know. We shared the stage with them all. Dean and Sammy, Joey and Peter, sweet Lolo and Danny, of course. Danny Gans. So tragic.”

  I bit my lip. I didn’t think stars like Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Junior, if that’s who she meant, ever ‘shared’ their stage. Not with a small Californian dance troupe.

  “I gave everything to the Bailarin, you know,” she said. “It was my passion that lifted us. I gave it my heart and soul. It was the others that gave up, all of them, one after the other. But I'm still here and I haven’t given up. I still have what it takes.”

  We’d distracted her, but she was a long way from convinced about us.

  “We need to be crystal clear about this,” she said. “I’m her agent and either you abide by my decisions on what you can print, or you’ll never have another chance to talk to Tamanny. She’s the next big star. She is tomorrow’s face, and I will not let anything get in the way of that. I need to sign off on everything before you get into print runs. I’ll need full copies before, including any photographs and placement in magazines. Oh, and I’ll want contact information for any advertisers whose products appear alongside the article. The same will apply when you interview me.”

  The stuff was about to hit the fan.

  I knew next to nothing about the industry, but I knew that no one could command those sort of assurances from any reputable magazine. If any of those still existed. And besides, we were complete fakes.

  Tamanny had wandered to one side and turned her back on the discussion. I followed her. I didn’t have much time left.

  “Listen to me,” I said.

  She swung her young-old eyes around to me and I tasted bile, imagining the worst the industry could do to her. The worst Forsythe could do to her. I wanted nothing more than to kidnap her right now; take her away and give her back a childhood.

  “I…uhh...” She glanced at her mother. Elizabetta was doing an excellent job, being distracting, and buying me a few more moments with Tamanny.

  “You don’t need to answer anything. Let me just say a few words. Can’t hurt, can it?”

  She bit her lip.

  “You’re scared. You don’t trust the people around you.”

  The fear I’d sensed rose in her eyes. Her mouth moved, but no sound came out.

  I reached. I didn’t intend to this time; it just happened. My eukori worked. It flowed out and tangled with hers.

  There was no way of accurately describing any of the eukori I sensed. I relied on strange associations the feelings made in my head. Tamanny’s eukori was like rose petals falling. A gentle pull and I could feel the fear swirling below. Beneath the shield of laughing at ‘creeps’, and making fun of them, she was genuinely afraid of some of the people she was meeting. And through the fear was threaded another feeling, like being caught by rose thorns, being unable to get away, being trapped. A feeling I knew. I could remember the steel kiss of the angoisse clasped around my throat, the sharp spines pressing against my flesh.

  I blinked away unexpected tears. Fourteen!

  Behind me, I heard the question that was going to get us thrown out. “Which magazine? Who’s your editor? I need to talk to them.” Mrs. Harper had her cell out.

  “Well, we’re freelancers. Our work will be up for bidding—”

  “Freelancers? Fucking freelancers! This is a con. Get the fuck away from her.”

 
Her voice had become a screech and she was pushing past Elizabetta. I had a couple of seconds, no more.

  “Listen to me,” I said, words flowing out of me. “I am someone you can trust with your life. When you need help, call me and I will come for you.”

  I gave her my card with my number.

  She blinked.

  For a second I thought she was going to hold it up and look at it. Her mother would snatch it out of her hand and throw it back at me.

  I shifted to put my body between her and her mother. Just another second. Just…

  Tamanny’s hand twisted like a conjuror doing a trick. My card had disappeared.

  You go, girl. You survive, dammit.

  Her mother’s hand grabbed my shoulder and jerked me back.

  “Get the fuck out of here!” she shouted in my face. “I’m calling security.”

  I put my hands up and backed away. Tamanny’s head was down and her mother shoved her toward the elevators.

  We let them go and made our own way down afterwards.

  The hotel staff weren’t interested in us as long as we left, and we were outside a minute later.

  “You get the same feeling about this?” Elizabetta asked.

  I nodded. “Her mother’s got some kind of guilt trip on Tamanny. Something along the lines of she gave it all up to raise her, and now it’s time to pay back.”

  “You sensed that? Your eukori?”

  I nodded. “I think so. It sort of worked.”

  “That woman is full of it,” Elizabetta spat. “I mean, what a piece of work!”

  “Yeah, but it doesn’t prove anything about Forsythe,” I said, arguing against my instincts. “Tamanny doesn’t think he’s the problem.”

  “No, I suppose he buys her shoes out of the goodness of his heart.”

  “Hey, I’m on your side,” I said. “He’s a sick predator, but that doesn’t change the facts. She didn’t give us anything we could use against Forsythe.”

  “And her mother’s no use. She won’t care what happens as long as the money’s good and she gets her name in lights.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  But as I said it, I looked back up at the impersonal height of the hotel. The blank eyes of the windows looking out over downtown LA made me think of Mrs. Harper’s eyes. Soulless. My gut told me Elizabetta was right.

  My gut knew there were a host of his victims I was too late to save. Even where I wasn’t too late, there were too many, too widely distributed. I couldn’t save everyone, but if I could save Tamanny, maybe that was how I could pay my debt to Fay. Maybe that would ease that feeling.

  Where the hell’s our car?

  One Altau guard was standing ten yards away from us, scanning the street.

  I was about to move us into somewhere more sheltered when I saw the other guard drive around the corner in the car.

  “Shit!” Elizabetta said from behind me. “That’s just what we need.”

  I looked back sharply at her tone.

  She pulled me close and lifted her cell up as if to show me something. The screen was blank.

  “Not the cell. Across the street. In the window seat of the café,” she said.

  A guy sat sipping a drink. A camera sat on the table in front of him, pointed, as if by accident, at the hotel doors.

  “That’s one of the detectives from Jefferson’s Major Crimes division.”

  Two problems.

  One, there would be a photo of us. Two, if more detectives were getting involved, this wasn’t an off-the-books project for Major Crimes any more, it was a case, and we would be getting in their way.

  Chapter 50

  “Jeez. It’s only a couple of miles,” I bitched. “And we’re still not home.”

  “It’s LA traffic,” the driver said. “And Christmas shopping. We’re heading for gridlock.”

  So much for a quick getaway. If the detective had called Jefferson Reed, and been ordered to bring us in for questioning, he’d had enough time to eat lunch, finish the newspaper and rapidly overtake us at a leisurely stroll.

  Maybe the lookout hadn’t recognized Elizabetta. Maybe Reed wasn’t available. Maybe he’d just wait and see where we went.

  “We’re walking,” I said. “You want to ditch the car or split up?”

  The two security guys looked at each other. “Ditch it. We’ll come get it tonight.”

  One of them handed us instant disguises: scarves and Jackie O sunglasses.

  “Basilikos are gonna be as stuck as this car is,” I grumbled, but I put them on anyway.

  We managed to leave the car in a car wash compound for more money than they made from a normal day’s work.

  The temperature was perfect for walking, but we’d have choked on car fumes on the boulevard. We struck out in a straight line for home, more or less, the security guys a few paces behind us.

  I had a message waiting. Jen was back.

  I called, but Jen’s cell was busy. Dante’s was switched off, damn the girl, as were Julie’s and Keith’s and Alex’s.

  I didn’t want to disturb Yelena. Instead I managed to get through to Bian and update her on everything that had happened in Denver.

  She’d just received an invitation to visit Cameron in Santa Fe, and an offer for the use of the pack’s buildings as bases.

  “So that’s it, Round-eye? You’ve solved all my furry problems?” she said.

  “Just being my usual helpful self.”

  She snorted. “Truth be told, I’m glad you called. They’ve been so cooperative, I keep expecting the other shoe to drop.”

  “It’s genuine. Have they helped with finding anyone?”

  “The packs rounded up some stray Aspirants and seven Romero who broke House with their kin to go underground when they saw what was happening.”

  Broke House—managed to overcome the Athanate impulse to follow the head of your House regardless. Not necessarily a point in their favor, seen through Athanate eyes. But Bian would know what she was doing.

  “And thanks to your furry friends in LA helping with security,” Bian said, “Skylur’s allowed a few more from there to join me. I’m also hoping to pick up some of your old colleagues from Ops 4-10 when Skylur decides they can be let out. Overall, we’re going great down here. Oh, and Rita sends her love.”

  I laughed. “Are my two favorite kittens getting along okay?”

  “Meow. Gotta go.”

  We jinked a street or two and doubled back to flush out anyone trailing us.

  Nothing.

  In all likelihood Reed’s detective hadn’t recognized Elizabetta, but Reed himself would once he saw the photos. The confrontation was inevitable—no way he would believe we’d been there by chance. Not after the questions he must already have about us.

  At least there was an end in sight for Elizabetta’s deception, but I kept that thought to myself.

  ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

  An hour or so later, we arrived at the house, thanked our escort and went in.

  Dominé met us in the hall.

  “I have instructions from Yelena,” she said, demanding our cellphones.

  Okay.

  Once I’d surrendered mine and was allowed in, she nodded up at the split level where the bedrooms and office were.

  “I have now had the pleasure of meeting Jennifer. She’s in the office,” she said, not smiling at all. Much.

  I took the stairs three at a time.

  Jen was sitting at her desk, on the landline now. She gave me a huge smile, blew a kiss and waved me to a chair while she started winding up her business call.

  I sat and let out a sigh of satisfaction. Just having her back in the house felt better.

  It looked as if she hadn’t taken the time to change after arriving at the airport—she was still in her business suit, still made up. This was Jen in her element, the business CEO. I forgot sometimes, because I usually saw her relaxing at home.

  She ended her call and came around the desk, slipping into my arms l
ike the missing piece of the puzzle finding its home.

  We kissed, long and deep. It left me breathless. And my jaw throbbing with fangs that promised to manifest with the slightest encouragement.

  “I love you,” we said at the same time, as we broke the kiss.

  She nuzzled my neck. “I’m sorry, honey, I have calls stacking up like buzzards over a dead cow.”

  I laughed. “Can I help?”

  “Hell, yeah. I’ve got just a couple more I can’t put off. I’d like to do the second one right after the first and I haven’t prepped it.” She pointed at a stack of printed and handwritten sheets. “Could you have a look at the notes and give me a list of bullet points in order of priority please? With your opinion. You should have about twenty to thirty minutes.”

  What the hell did I know about her business deals? I opened my mouth to complain and the phone rang.

  “My conference call,” she said and dived back around the desk.

  I laughed again, shuffled the stack of papers and scanned through them, expecting something about accounts. She knew I was good with numbers.

  But the sheaf of documents wasn’t about Kingslund Group finances or any obscure commercial deals. It was about the shortfalls in treatment of veterans with injuries.

  Oh yes, I had an opinion on this!

  The problem would be holding my opinion back and giving the documents a rational assessment.

  I began to write furiously and lost myself so thoroughly in the arguments, I didn’t even notice her call ending. It was a genuine surprise when she interrupted by kneeling down beside me.

  “I love it when you throw yourself at something like there’s nothing else in the world.” Her voice came out husky, and thrills ran down my spine.

  “I have someone I want to throw myself at right now,” I said, leaning into her.

  Her lips grazed mine and pulled away.

  I groaned.

  “One last call. Just this one. Promise.”

  She sat back in her executive chair and paused with one hand poised above the telephone number pad.

  “Excellent,” she muttered, eyes focused on the notes I’d written. “Oh. Interesting! This is the real skinny.”