“Sid’s a fantastic tracker, and Ivory’s gonna be real pissed about that golden bullet you put in her. She don’t like to lose.” He kicked back the blankets and climbed out of bed. “But she gets bored of her little games pretty quickly. She’ll mope around New York a bit, then go off to bother one of the others. And then if I’m really lucky, I might go two, three hundred years without having to see them again.” He yawned. “You’ll be dead by then.”
Jasper frowned. Florida was a long way away. It was miles out of his jurisdiction, though Hunting groups were known to work cooperatively across borders without much fuss. However, there was no way to guarantee the Hunters from Florida wouldn’t interfere with their operation, nor would there be any easy mode of escape should things go wrong.
“I’m going to go see if there’s coffee. You wanna come with? They’re probably still serving breakfast.”
#
A cluster of uniformed officers, one plainclothes detective, and an extremely hyperactive photographer were gathered in the hotel lobby around a nervous-looking man who kept wringing his hands and fretting at his mustache.
Jasper and Crimson were almost to the double set of doors that led to the dining room when the detective looked up and spotted them. “Hey! You two!”
They both turned, Jasper reluctantly, Crimson with a convincingly feigned “who me?” expression on his face. The detective came striding towards them with a steno pad under his arm and a pen behind his ear. He stopped right in front of them, glanced down at the notepad and then back up at them. “You’re… Thomas Reed? Twentieth floor? Room 2011?”
“That’s me,” said Crimson. “Is there a problem?”
“We aren’t sure yet,” replied the detective. “Last night, the receptionist, uhh… Andrea Huston, abandoned her post. She hasn’t been seen since.”
“Yeah, I thought it was a little weird I couldn’t get anyone at the front desk last night,” said Crimson. “Jack got locked outta the room for like two hours. Real shit service. Wouldn’t recommend it.”
The detective’s eyes narrowed at him slightly, but Crimson only smiled. “Is there some way I can help?”
“We have security footage of the two of you coming and going from the hotel around the time of her disappearance. Actually, we have footage of him coming and going.” He pointed at Jasper. “You just show up, but we can’t find any video of you leaving. Isn’t that weird?”
Crimson shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. I don’t know how it coulda missed me though.”
“Maybe you left via another route?” suggested the detective.
Crimson laughed. “Oh yeah, sure. Maybe I jumped from the twentieth floor. Or maybe… I dunno… this is just a guess but, uhh…” He pointed at the corner of the room, where a single camera hung facing out across the lobby, pointed towards the front desk. “Maybe your top-of-the-line security system from 1975 just missed me.”
The detective looked back at the hotel owner, who shrugged weakly. “We aren’t the Four Seasons, Detective Mercer. We have one camera in the elevator and one in the lobby, and that’s it.”
“Ah yes, the elevator,” said Mercer. “There’s no footage of you in there either, Mr. Reed. Yet… you’re on the twentieth floor.”
“Stairs are fantastic for cardio,” replied Crimson, then, “Am I under arrest, Detective Mercer?”
The man took the pen from behind his ear and wrote something in the steno pad, then shook his head. “No, Mr. Reed. But… let’s just say you’re a person of interest.”
Crimson grinned. “Well, there’s something we can agree on. Now… if you don’t mind… Jack and I had a late night last night, and since we couldn’t get any room service—” he shot a withering glance over at the owner “—we’re pretty hungry. Feel free to drop in if you think of any more questions, yeah?”
“Don’t leave the city,” said Mercer, unsmiling. Either Crimson wasn’t using his glamor, or this guy was the sort of human who would be green-lighted for the Hunting program at St. James.
“Sure thing, officer,” said Crimson. “Jackie?”
Jasper was using his entire focus to remain calm and attentive towards the officer, and it took him a second to realize he was “Jackie,” but when he did, he nodded and dipped through the double doors with the werespider.
“Fuckin’ flatfoot,” muttered Crimson as the doors swung shut behind them. He grabbed a stray newspaper off a vacant table and dropped down into a chair near the buffet.
Jasper had been hungry, but after the encounter with the officer, he found he had somewhat lost his appetite. He still went and piled a plate with bacon, eggs, and two pieces of toast smeared in butter. He poured so much milk and sugar into his coffee that it barely resembled coffee anymore, then went back to the table, where Crimson was reading comic strips with the sort of serious face someone reading about the stock market might have.
After a long, drawn silence where Jasper did little but pick miserably at his eggs, he said, “I can’t believe it doesn’t bother you at all. That girl didn’t deserve that.”
Crimson glanced up at Jasper, then at the plate in front of him. “You know pigs are as intelligent as a three-year-old human child? And the cows they use as slaves to make your delicious butter make best friends? Don’t even get me started on the way they treat chickens.”
“What’re you, an animal rights activist now?” Jasper didn’t like what the werespider was implying.
Crimson shook his head. “No way. I think you should eat whatever you want to eat.” He flipped the newspaper closed, folded it in half, and stood. “I also think pots should be careful about calling kettles black.”
Chapter Ten
—
Highway to Hell
Alcander said it would be a lot easier crossing the country in a car that wasn’t hot. Crimson said going the legal route would be “way less exciting” but relented at the rent-a-car outlet when, after some tricky fraud on Al’s part, they green-lighted him for a racy 2003 S-Type Jaguar in all black. It was blissfully more spacious than the Buick and drove like a dream in comparison. The fact that it didn’t smell like two-week-old french fries and dirty socks was just icing on the cake.
Alcander didn’t drive and seemed uncomfortable even being in the vehicle. So that just left Jasper and Crimson and roughly eighteen hours of congested interstates, backcountry byways, and toll roads, all of which seemed to be in an eternal state of construction.
The sticker on the dashboard insisted that the car wasn’t meant to be smoked in, but even Jasper had to admit they had to ignore it. If they had to stop every fifteen minutes for Crimson to smoke, they wouldn’t reach Florida for weeks, and frankly, as the temperature rose steadily from hot to hotter to sweltering and swampy, he didn’t want to get out either.
Being trapped in a car with two demons on a cross-country road trip should have been a personal Hell for Jasper… but he was surprised to find it wasn’t. Al barely spoke except to comment on landmarks they passed, the little bits of trivia droning from the back seat like a built-in tour guide. And Crimson’s style of driving, which was terrifying in the close-knit traffic of the inner city, felt much smoother and safer on the interstate, and in a car that didn’t feel like it was about to rattle apart if it broke sixty miles per hour.
There was a CD player, but they had no CDs, so they passed the time flipping between radio stations as they listed in and out of range, oftentimes so quickly that the song playing didn’t even have time to complete. Jasper was surprised when, time after time, the werespider stopped on frequencies playing classic rock. The second time he stopped for the opening riff of The Rolling Stones’ “Paint It, Black,” Jasper couldn’t help but ask, “So, uh… You’re a fan of old-school rock, huh?” He didn’t know why he hadn’t expected them to have this in common. He assumed that much of the way the werespider presented himself was a very elaborate act. The voice. The clothes. The smile. Underneath the skin, a mindless, malevolent predator was puppeting around this once-human body like an an
glerfish.
But it didn’t feel that way.
“Well, yeah. Of course. You have any idea what music was like before rock ’n roll?”
Jasper couldn’t help but grin. “I don’t like to think about it for too long.”
“Yeah, well, consider yourself lucky. I had to live it.”
They had to stop periodically, partially because Jasper needed to eat, use the restroom and stretch, partially because Crimson was incapable of going more than six hours without a drink, and partially because of Alcander’s sporadic panic attacks. All of the rest stops were eerily similar with poorly lit bathrooms and dusty chocolate bars, the clerks all dead-eyed and uninterested. The racks of magnets and postcards always showed the same faded pictures, the magazines out of date and thoroughly read over. All of them seemed to have racks of T-shirts with pictures of Arizona despite the fact that Arizona was on the other side of the country.
“Check it out,” Crimson said, tossing a plastic bag into Jasper’s lap as they pulled out of a rest stop in Richmond, Virginia, the highway a dark stretch ahead of them. The Hunter glared at him but looked anyway. Inside were a couple of packs of Marlboros, a handful of BIC lighters and, most interestingly, half a dozen CDs. Jasper grabbed some and flipped through them. Best of Led Zeppelin. The Essential Billy Joel. Queen’s Greatest Hits.
“Hey, no way. This is sweet.” Jasper ripped open the plastic wrap on the Queen CD and put it in the player. He was getting tired of surfing channels and listening to local radio ads.
“I found ’em behind a shit ton of gospel albums,” Crimson said. “And those lighters are for you so you’ll fuckin’ stop stealin’ mine.” It might have been touching if he hadn’t almost certainly stolen everything in the bag.
As the music played, the last of the tension seemed to float out the open windows into the warm night air. Jasper tapped his foot to the beat until halfway through “Somebody to Love” Crimson started singing, his fingers tapping out the tempo on the steering wheel. His singing voice was much better than it ought to have been considering the thick New York accent it usually carried, smooth and sweet as honey. A little surprised, Jasper watched him in the passing headlights of other cars, still wearing his sunglasses even though the sun had set hours ago. A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth and he joined in, hesitantly at first. He wasn’t as good a singer as the werespider. Eventually he didn’t care.
Jasper knew all the words to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” but Crimson could hit every note, which he hadn’t thought anyone but Freddie Mercury could do. He had a story for every song, sometimes about the band, where he had seen them, where he had been the first time he heard one of their songs. At one point, as Jazz was putting in the third CD, Crimson asked him why he was so into classic rock. “Aren’t you a little young? What are you, sixteen?”
“I’m eighteen,” Jasper corrected. He thought about telling a joke or shrugging the question off. Crimson seemed to have been pretty honest with him. He decided to be honest too. “My dad was really into it. I have all his old records, and I’ve listened to them all the time since I was a kid. I never knew him, he and my mom died when I was really young, and it just sort of… made me feel close to him. That and it literally, actually rocks.”
“How did your parents die?”
“Car crash,” Jasper explained.
“Imagine that,” said Crimson. “A rare, possibly undiscovered breed of demon killed in something as boring as a human car crash.” Jasper opened his mouth to tell him to shut up (seriously, why did he always have to ruin everything?), but Crimson continued, “You’re lucky no one got their hands on you when you were just a baby. You’d be living in a lab or a research facility by now.”
“C’mon, Crimson, stop with the exaggerations.”
“I’m not exaggerating,” said Crimson. “I don’t know what you are.”
“That doesn’t mean nobody does.” He had asked Charlie numerous times, especially around the age of thirteen, when his eyes had first begun to glow white. Charlie convinced him it was some sort of latent psychic ability, but he hadn’t known it affected his scent until he was sixteen and started working regularly in the field. Prior to that, he hadn’t had much interaction with people outside the academy in Seattle. There was Adam, of course, but he was the son of another hunting family; his parents both worked there alongside Charlie. Usually psychic abilities begot a track in the magical division, but Jasper had no talent for magic and had pursued combat instead.
If he was some sort of demon hybrid, someone at St. James surely would have noticed. Right?
“That’s fair, I guess.” Crimson glanced at him out of the corner of his eye. “I’m sorry about your parents.”
“Thanks,” replied Jasper. Though he didn’t believe the demon could possibly care, it was very civil of him to pretend. “And it’s okay, really. Like I said, I never really knew them, and I had a great adoptive father. It really doesn’t bother me.”
Crimson made a thoughtful noise. “It would bother me.” He steered them down an exit ramp, bringing them to a truck stop. This one sported a twenty-four-hour diner as well as a gas station. He tossed Jasper the keys as he climbed out of the car, throwing his sunglasses in the driver’s seat. In the back seat, Alcander was just waking up. “You wanna fill up the tank, grab something to eat?”
“Where are you going?” asked Jasper.
“For a walk,” replied Crimson.
“Where to?”
Crimson sighed, running his hand along the back of his neck. He was still wearing his long leather jacket despite the rising temperature. “Why you gotta make things so difficult?”
The stop was fairly busy, with lines of semitrucks parked along the back lot and a smattering of family vehicles parked in the front. The muffled sound of a child screaming for no good reason reached them from one of the cars. Beyond the parking lot, there was a wooded area, not quite dense enough to be called a forest, and apart from the interstate, there was no sign of civilization for miles in either direction.
At first, he didn’t understand where Crimson could possibly be going. His human pantomime was so well refined it made it easy to forget or to ignore what he was, but the sheen in his eyes brought it back instantly. Jasper shot a glare at him. “Are you going hunting?”
“We’re stopping for dinner,” said Crimson, the glimmer in his eyes starting to brighten. It seemed to alter him from the ground up, the monster showing through the mask. “We aren’t all so lucky as to have it served to us on a platter.” He blinked, and just as quickly as it had shown, the light was gone. “Would ya rather have me lose my fuckin’ mind behind the wheel?”
“No,” said Jasper softly. He looked out across the parking lot again, at the semis in their eerily silent lines, their steel bodies glimmering in the bright lights around the stop. He looked back at Crimson. “How do you choose?”
Crimson shrugged. “If I wait a bit, they usually choose for me.” He stepped past him, heading towards the back lot. “If not, there’s always convenience. Keep an eye on Al, would you?”
Jasper found this answer less than satisfactory, and he started to go after the werespider to tell him so, but Alcander, still looking half-asleep, rolled down his window. “What are we doing?”
Jasper watched Crimson wander to the back lot, his hands in his pockets, looking as if he really were just going for a stroll, his only intent to stretch his legs after the long hours in the car. He disappeared around the corner of the building, and Jasper turned away, trying not to think about it. “We stopped to get something to eat,” he said. He almost asked if Al wanted anything before realizing what that would mean. “Come in with me.”
“Um…” The vampire looked towards where the werespider had gone, then reluctantly back at Jasper.
“You can stay in the car if you really want.”
“Um… no. I will go with you.” He followed Jasper into the diner, sticking right beside him the whole way. It reminded Jasper vaguely of a much young
er version of himself on the rare occasions when Charlie took him grocery shopping.
They were seated at a booth in front of the window. Alcander seemed bound and determined to touch nothing and kept his hands folded firmly in his lap as the waitress took their orders. The vampire ordered coffee, Jasper a grilled cheese and fries with a cup of soup on the side.
“So, uh…” Whenever he was around Alcander, Crimson had been there too, so they had spent very little time together just one on one. He felt like he should talk to him, if only to distract himself from the probable homicide occurring in the woods. “Is it like… rude to ask how old you are?”
“I will be turning seventy-six in October,” replied Alcander. Jasper’s expression must have given away the fact that he was trying to do the math in his head because the vampire added gently, “I was born in 1929.”
“Oh.” The age was not surprising, exactly. Jasper knew there were lots of vampires who were older than that in New York, but the problem with vampires was that there were so fucking many of them. Most of the vampires Jasper had met (murdered) were younger because the young ones were stupider. They were reckless, and their recklessness drew attention to them. Many didn’t even live to see thirty. “Are you from New York?”
“Boston,” said Alcander. Another patron passed close by their table, and Alcander shifted deeper into the booth, eyes darting uncomfortably to follow the man’s movement until he was well away from them. Perhaps this wasn’t the vampire who had escaped St. James with Crimson after all. “Born and raised.”
“How’d you end up in New York?”
The vampire’s eyes went down to his hands. “Sorry, I do not like to talk about it.”
“That’s alright,” said Jasper.
The waitress arrived with Jasper’s Coke and Alcander’s coffee. She told them their food would be around in “two shakes” and then was off again, this time to clean up the dirty dishes at the table across the way. Jasper noticed that whoever had dined there hadn’t left a tip. He wondered if the person made it back to their vehicle alive.
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