“Not a fling,” I said. “But none of your business. What are you doing here?”
“Substantiating rumors,” she said, gaze roving over my now-human form. “It’s true.”
“Yeah, it’s true,” I said. This was just what I needed. Like dead vampires weren’t enough to deal with this week.
“What vampires are dead?” Angela asked, her lips curving into a frown.
Shit.
“Don’t read my mind,” I said defensively. “It’s rude.”
“I’m not. I’m reading your thoughts, which are swirling around you like a tornado, Henri. It’s impossible to ignore them.”
“Did Ry call you?”
“Yes,” she said. “But I’ve been meaning to come. I didn’t believe it at first, but then Sean sent me a letter—”
“You guys exchange letters? Like, on paper?”
She ignored my questions. “You never regretted what you were. It’s hard to believe you’d ever allow yourself to… regress.” She spoke in the certain terms of someone who knew my deepest, darkest thoughts, because she did. She could read them. And that never stopped being a little unsettling.
“I didn’t take the Cure on purpose,” I said in the wary tone of someone who had had to explain it a thousand different times. “This was thrust upon me like a curse.” I remembered the pain of the needle and the excitement dancing in Neha’s eyes as she destroyed what I was for her own gain.
“I can kill her for you,” Angela said.
“I can kill her myself if I want,” I said, pushing Neha out of my thoughts to prevent Angela from getting any more information. “Don’t do that, okay? If I don’t speak it aloud, it’s off limits.”
Angela shrugged. “To me, it’s all the same. You’re a loud thinker. You know that.” She leaned closer and her fingers ran down my cheek, her head tilted like a predator trying to determine if I was prey. Her skin was cool against my hot, mortal skin. She met my eyes for a long second and I tried to think of nothing, or maybe a giant marshmallow man attacking New York. Anything to keep my secrets.
Angela’s smile was vicious. “If I wanted to know your secrets, I could.”
“Fuck you.”
Her smile widened, showing fangs. She regarded me with cold, predatory eyes.
I shuddered, the primal impulse to flee this monster in front of me making my heart race with instinctual fear. I wasn’t afraid of her. I refused to be. But instinct rarely listened to reason. I tried to guard my thoughts as best as I could, but trying to rein them in was exhausting.
“It suits you,” she said finally.
“What?”
“Being human.”
I snorted derisively. “No, it doesn’t.”
“You’re adapting better than most would. Even the Weepers don’t want what you have, not really. They think they do, but they lie to themselves. What they want is a life without guilt. They want permission to be the monsters they’ve become, not to go backward.”
I thought of Eva. I wondered if that was true of her too. She’d backed off from finding the Cure, at least for now. Almost losing her life probably made her immortality seem all the more precious.
“I’m coping because I don’t have a choice. No one will turn me back. But I don’t want to be human.” I felt like I was always having this argument, always having to prove that I wanted my fangs back. I was damn good at surviving, but that didn’t mean I was happy.
Angela’s gaze raked over me again. Her eyes were emerald green and shone in the dark. “You’ll be a vampire again soon enough. Enjoy the sun. Most of us will never get the chance again.”
“What, are you psychic now, too?” I asked. Angela was telepathic but she couldn’t predict the future, at least not as far as I knew.
She shook her head and spoke with an edge to her words. “No. But I know how Sean feels about you. He’ll never allow you to remain this way.” She looked away, down the street. There was nothing there that my mortal eyes or ears could sense.
“He’s being a dick about it,” I said.
Angela shrugged.
I didn’t want to talk about Sean anyhow, so I changed the subject.
“Have you seen Cazimir?” I asked.
“Not yet. I thought perhaps you’d come with me. If it’s not too exhausting.”
“Don’t throw my thoughts back in my face. I can’t help that you can hear them.” I dug my keys out of my purse. “Come on. I’ll drive.”
Chapter 12
Ry’s face lit up when he saw Angela, like his prayers had been answered.
“You came,” he said, like he couldn’t quite believe it.
“So I did,” she said flatly.
Ry nodded at me as I entered. His relief was palpable. I got the impression he wanted to bear-hug Angela for being there, but he held himself back.
“I swear he moved last night,” Ry said, which was clearly part of why he looked so relieved. “Just a twitch, but I know I saw it.”
“That’s a good sign,” I said, though in truth I doubted it was more than Ry’s wishful thinking.
Angela watched Ry for a long moment but did not speak. Then she turned toward the stairs. “Shall we?”
My stomach felt like a rock. What if she got up there and declared that Cazimir was gone, and his body was nothing but a magically preserved corpse? That his body had rejected vampirism and he was, for all intents and purposes, dead?
I shuddered, and Ry clapped a hand on my shoulder. I glared and he dropped his hand.
Upstairs, Angela leaned over Cazimir’s bed, lifting one wrist and then the other, like a nurse taking a pulse. Ry and I hung back near the doorway to give her room. She pulled his eyes open one at a time, looking into them before letting them fall closed.
She stared at him for a very long time. My lungs burned and I exhaled a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. Ry’s eyes were fixed on Cazimir’s pale face.
“He’s dreaming,” Angela finally said, turning back to us.
Ry nearly collapsed, instead leaning back against the wall as if all the energy had drained out of him. “Thank god.”
“So he’s—” I wriggled my fingers in the air, trying to conjure the question, “definitely in there?”
“Yes,” Angela said. “But he’s confused. His dreams are about his mortal life.”
Ry and I exchanged a look, neither of us sure what that might mean. I didn’t even know where or when Cazimir had spent his mortal years. At the same time, I felt some of the tension in my shoulders unknot. He was in there, or part of him was. Enough to dream. That was something. The dead don’t dream.
“Can you wake him?” Ry finally asked.
Angela turned back to the bed. “Perhaps.”
Ry glanced at me, a question in his expression.
“It will not be instantaneous. He’s buried deep in a layer of dreams and death. Give it time,” Angela said.
“It’s been a month.” Ry’s voice was grim, as if this news might affect Angela’s assessment.
“One cycle of the moon is nothing to our kind,” Angela said. She bent down and whispered into Cazimir’s ear so quietly that I couldn’t quite make it out.
Ry did, because he inhaled sharply and said, “What did you call him?”
“His birth name, because he may respond to it in this state. If he’s never told it to you, I suggest you forget it and never let it cross your lips.”
Ry’s eyes widened slightly. He swallowed. “Yeah. Okay. I won’t. I just… I’d never heard it before.”
“Keep it that way,” Angela insisted. “I’m here to wake this immortal, nothing more. His secrets are his, and if you love him as you think you do, you’ll forget them until he offers them to you himself.”
Ry nodded. I was glad I hadn’t heard the name. Secrets were often a burden, and vampires carried enough of their own. They didn’t need to hold on to the former lives of others.
A long moment passed where Angela pressed a hand against Cazimir’s forehead a
nd spoke softly into his ear, pausing to listen as if he were answering.
Finally, she said, “He seems mired in his life as a mortal boy, like he’s stuck under a glass dome, and I can’t break it.”
“Can’t you get in his head? Not just see his thoughts, but actually…” I trailed off.
The look Angela shot me was dark and unhappy. She’d always flatly denied that she could insert things into people’s minds the way she pulled them out, but I’d seen her do it. I’d watched her convince someone they hadn’t witnessed a vampire snacking on a person’s neck.
“I can try to break the barriers his mind has erected, but it will take time to tear them down,” she said.
“How much time?” Ry asked, sounding only curious and not as impatient as he must have felt.
Angela shrugged her shoulders. “I’ve never had the chance to see it through before.”
Ry nodded and ran fingers through his black hair. I stared past Angela to the still form on the bed, still unable to reconcile this motionless creature with the melodramatic vampire “king” Caz had once been.
“You’re young,” Angela said to me. “You haven’t seen how drastically people change over time.”
Her words jolted me, and she smiled weakly.
“People don’t change,” Ry said firmly.
“Sure they do,” she said. “They must in order to survive. Henri has changed.”
“I’ve been transformed,” I corrected, irritation flaring up inside my midsection. “That’s not the same thing.”
Angela stared at me in that unsettling way she had that seemed to say she knew more than I did about everything. Then she turned to Ry. “I’ll need a chair to sit beside him.”
Ry nodded and bounded downstairs to get one.
“I haven’t changed,” I insisted. I was still me, still a monster, a killer, a creature of the night. I was just temporarily stuck in a human package.
Angela cocked her head and considered. “You’ve matured a bit.”
I opened my mouth to ask her what the hell she meant by that, but Ry returned with a wooden chair before I could start a fight about it. If she was suggesting I’d been immature last time we’d met, several decades ago, she could kiss my ass.
Ry set the chair next to the bed. It had come from the dining table in his kitchen and had a red gingham cushion on the seat.
Ry reached over and smoothed Cazimir’s forehead. “Wake him up.”
“If it can be done, I will do it.”
“It’s good of you to try,” he said.
Ry lingered over Cazimir and then finally got up, leaving the chair for Angela.
As I turned to go, I saw her pull out a small pocketknife and cut open her finger. It made sense that giving Caz some of her blood, even just a drop or two, would help her insert herself into his thoughts. For vampires, blood is like an HDMI cable, transmitting pictures straight from someone’s mind when blood is shared.
Ry and I headed downstairs.
“He’s in there,” Ry said softly, as if he couldn’t quite believe it. I simply felt relieved. “I’ve known him over fifty years. If anyone’s too stubborn to die, it’s Cazimir.”
“That’s a long time,” I said, although in the grand scheme of things, fifty years wasn’t a lot for beings that lived forever. Ry and I were both pretty young on the vampiric scale.
“It’s freaky that he’s having dreams of his mortal life. He didn’t have a happy one, from the little he’s told me of it,” Ry said.
“Did any of us?” I asked, smiling slightly. My mortal life had been pretty boring, but it hadn’t been bad. Dull and mundane, but not full of turmoil or trauma. Still, I’d wanted more. And that was key with vampires who survived and thrived: none of us would ever be happy as mundane mortals with ordinary lives.
“Mine was all right,” Ry said.
Silence filled the room. The floor creaked slightly above us and Ry bolted up, only to sit back down when no more noise followed. I thought Angela was right—waking Caz would take time, but I couldn’t blame Ry for wanting it to happen right the hell now.
I decided to broach the subject of him donating blood “Have you thought about what I asked?”
Ry looked jarred by the abrupt change of subject. “I’m still considering. I mean, if Angela—“
“That doesn’t help me,” I snapped.
Ry raised his eyebrows and a small smile tugged at his lips. “Shit, Henri, at least try to pretend the request isn’t wholly selfish.”
“What’s wrong with being selfish?” I folded my arms over my chest and met his gaze with a glare.
Ry’s smile widened. “Nothing.” He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “I’m still thinking, okay? It’s not a small thing.”
I let out a breath and forced my stomach to unclench. He was right. Asking a vampire for blood was a big deal. Doubly so when I was asking because I wanted to hand it over to a scientist. It ran counter to everything vampires believed: that it was imperative to keep evidence out of the hands of mortals, and there was no greater evidence a scientist could get ahold of than the blood of a preternatural creature.
“Okay,” I said.
Ry clapped me on the shoulder again. I didn’t shrug him off this time.
“Maybe Caz will turn you back,” Ry said. “He’s always liked you.”
I frowned. “He has?”
Cazimir and I had not really been well acquainted before I was given the Cure against my will. I’d gone to a few of his parties and used his incinerator a handful of times. He’d always been a pain in the ass, requiring that I play along with his delusions of grandeur to get anything from him. I’d avoided him and his Factory as much as possible.
“He thinks what happened to you was shitty as hell. He thought so before that jerkass boy toy of his stuck him with the Cure. He came over here the night after you were Cured and he was livid. Said he couldn’t understand why you’d been stupid enough to fool around with a mortal scientist.” Ry smiled at the memory of Caz’s rant, which must have been impressive. Cazimir was king of melodrama, if nothing else. “But he also didn’t believe you’d wanted a Cure for yourself. Said you were too good a vampire for that.”
I was still amazed that the vampire I’d thought of as an arrogant annoyance had been the only one in my corner when I’d needed a friend. Cazimir had definitely saved my life the night I’d gone to the Factory for help. Without his intervention, the other vampires would have torn me to shreds and then hunted Neha down and done the same to her. I’d assumed Caz had had some ulterior motive for making sure I got out of there alive. Maybe Ry was right, and he just liked me enough that he thought I was worth saving.
That didn’t mean I thought Caz would turn me back.
“I don’t need him to turn me,” I said. “I need him to wake up and prove it can be done.”
Ry lifted his hand from his shoulder and made a finger gun, aiming it at me and pretending to pull the trigger. “He will. If anyone can coax that asshole awake, Angela can.”
I really hoped that was true. “Hey, you wanna go get a drink?” I asked.
I needed to find out more about Bea, and how she’d ended up inside that circle. Assuming the skeleton was hers and I wasn’t wrong. But I couldn’t ask too many questions of Lark without tipping her off that something was going on. As far as Lark knew, Bea had died in the Factory Fire.
So I figured the best place to start was with the mortals. If they were smart, they’d stay the hell away from places like Underground and lay low. But then again, if they were smart, they wouldn’t have set fire to the home of powerful sleeping vampires in the middle of the afternoon.
“I’d love to get out of the house, but I should really be here. You know, in case he wakes up.”
I doubted Angela could work that quickly, but I understood.
“Text me if anything happens.”
Ry promised that he would.
Chapter 13
By the tim
e I got to Pioneer Square and actually found a parking spot, it was after two in the morning, which was the legal cutoff time for serving alcohol, and hence when most bars in Seattle closed. Some clubs stayed open later, simply ceasing alcohol service at two, but that was the exception rather than the rule.
Underground followed the liquor laws in theory, but like the speakeasies of my mortal years, the bar staff was perfectly happy to ignore a law when it ran counter to their preferences. As long as everyone inside was familiar and definitely not a liquor control board employee, they’d serve until right before sunrise. Rhonda, the bar’s vampire owner, lived above the bar, so it was a short commute for her to get to shelter after locking up.
I headed down the staircase at the entrance to the bar proper, which was about a story beneath the ground (hence the oh-so-creative name). I spotted Elliot at the end of the bar. Good. I could interrogate him and figure out why the mortals had gone from being pissy in a bar to setting fire to the Factory.
Elliot was wearing faded black slacks and a red jacket. Although he had a drink in front of him, he didn’t appear to be drinking it. It was something amber-colored in a rocks glass, and the ice had melted long ago, beads of water clinging to the sides.
I sat next to him. Rhonda was behind the bar, texting on her phone. She looked up, frowned when she saw it was me, and then made a what gesture, opening her free hand and gesturing to the bar, her way of asking what I wanted to drink. I shook my head. I wasn’t there to drink. She glanced around at the few remaining tables and then went back to her phone.
“Hey,” I said.
“Are you here to kill me?” Elliot asked. I couldn’t tell if he was being serious.
“I’m here to talk to you.”
“Got nothing to say. I told you, it wasn’t my idea. The minute those idiots starting talking seriously about trying to burn vampires alive, I noped the hell out, okay? I’m unhappy I was tossed out on my ass, but I’m not suicidal.”
“Why did you call me?” I was honestly curious. I didn’t think of myself as a great person to call in a crisis.
Sanguinity (Henri Dunn Book 3) Page 8