Bloodless (Henri Dunn Book 2)

by Tori Centanni

  If it was just a matter of the transformation going wrong, I wasn’t sure there was a way to fix it. After all, Cazimir’s heart had stopped before Ry had turned him. If he was brain-dead, there was no coming back from that.

  “I need to talk to some people,” I said.

  Sean was one of them, though I didn’t know what he’d make of all this. Like all of Sean’s relationships, his connection with Cazimir was indecipherable to me. I only knew they shared a history and some measure of affection. He’d want to know what was going on. Maybe Sean would even know a way to help him.

  Ry went over to the bed and brushed the hair off Cazimir’s forehead. Then we left him to his slumber, and hoped it wasn’t eternal.

  Downstairs, Ryuto sat on the sofa in his small living room. I could see stainless steel kitchen appliances through a door, and there was a hall that led somewhere else behind the staircase. Against the wall next to the sofa was a curio cabinet filled with other things made of Lego. Clearly, Ry had a hobby. That was a good thing. Eternity is a long damn time not to find little things that make you happy.

  Ry was pensive, flicking his fingers and tapping his feet.

  “We’ll fix it,” I said again. I didn’t know how, but I knew for damn sure that no matter how cold and uncaring the universe, there was no way in hell King Cazimir’s story ended like this, an unmoving lump in a bed. “Just don’t do anything stupid.”

  “I’m pretty sure I’ve already done as much damage as I’m capable of,” Ry said grimly.

  “I mean, don’t decide to take him to the Factory.”

  Ryuto blanched at the suggestion. “I’m not an idiot.”

  Vampires have a tendency to dispatch fledglings when things go wrong, whether it’s that the new vampire cannot control their bloodlust or because the vampire is too weak to protect themselves from things like sunlight, and thus risks exposing vampires to mundane humans. Whatever Lark felt for Cazimir, she’d be first in line to destroy him in this state and she’d consider it a mercy killing.

  Ry pulled out a pack of cigarettes and I raised my eyebrow, though the smell of burnt tobacco that clung to him meant I’d known he smoked. Vampires aren’t so flammable that a single spark is going to set them aflame, but smoking still struck me as a risky activity for an immortal. Most vampires are averse to fire and smoke, except in very contained spaces, like fireplaces.

  “Want one?” Ry asked, holding the pack out to me.

  I shook my head. I’d smoked some as a vampire, mostly cloves, and mostly to annoy Sean, but that had been a holdover of my own mortal smoking habits, which had developed back before anyone knew how deadly it was. Hell, in my time, cigarettes had been marketed to women as a way to prove you were sophisticated and independent. Some people had even claimed they had health benefits. Even though I didn’t plan to be human long enough to give myself lung disease, I didn’t want to pick up the habit again.

  “I’m good,” I said. I pointed upstairs. “Just don’t set the house on fire.”

  He laughed, blowing smoke out of his mouth. “Yeah, don’t worry about that.”

  I gave him a tight smile and then left before I could change my mind about the cigarette.

  As I walked down to where I’d parked, I called Sean. He didn’t answer his phone or the eighty-five subsequent text messages I sent telling him to call me. I was too angry to see Neha right now. I couldn’t be sure Cazimir’s coma was the result of her poison, but it wouldn’t do anyone any good if I punched her lights out before she could help.

  If she could help.

  If he wasn’t already too far gone to save.

  I wished Fiona would jump out of the bushes or Eva would accost me. I needed someone to take my anger out on. But neither of them obliged and I took it out on my tires, squealing away from the sidewalk and racing through the narrow residential streets at breakneck speeds.

  My throat hurt. I was still sore. I could have driven aimlessly around all night, but eventually, I gave up and went home, feeling more helpless and useless than ever.

  It was a shitty feeling.

  * * *

  When I opened the stairwell door to my apartment’s floor, I heard someone in the hall. My heart began its rapid-fire pounding and I reached into my purse for my Taser. I inched down the hall and peered around the corner. A figure stood outside my door. The light in the hall was out, which was strange. My stomach clenched.

  The figure was backlit by the window at the end of the hall. He was bigger than Fiona and almost definitely a guy, but it could have easily been her cohort.

  And then the figure turned to face me.

  I let out a breath of relief when I realized it was just Gene, the apartment manager. Fear flowed into anger, and I shoved my Taser back into my purse as I marched toward him.

  “Hey, there you are!” Gene said with feigned cheerfulness. “Look, I hate to be ‘that guy’”—he actually held up finger quotes around the last two words, and I resisted the urge to get my Taser back out again—“but I really need to get that paperwork from you.”

  “It’s after one in the morning,” I said, irritated that this guy was standing in front of my door in his sweatpants at this time of night.

  “I’m a night owl.” His smile was plastic. “I know you’re usually home around now, and since you weren’t earlier, I figured I’d come by when I had a chance of catching you.” He shrugged casually, like hanging out around women’s apartments in the middle of the night to demand things was business as usual. For Gene, it probably was. Maybe he, as a white dude, didn’t see the problem with that. But it ticked me off.

  “Well, good news,” I said. “My friend is staying with someone else. Decided he didn’t want to be on the lease.”

  Gene’s smile twitched, and I could see annoyance pass over his face like a cloud. “It’s better to be honest about these things,” he said. “I know a rent increase isn’t ideal, but I will see him coming and going, and if you’re lying about the occupants in your unit, you could get evicted.”

  “There’s nothing to see. He’s gone.”

  I pushed past Gene and shoved my key in the lock. I opened the door wide and let him have a good look in. From this angle, he couldn’t see that my sofa was a shell and the cushions were gone. But he could see that no one else was inside, unless they were hiding in the bedroom, and I was not inviting him in.

  Gene did not look pleased. He’d probably been promised some kind of bonus for finding ways to increase people’s rent.

  “Have a good night, Gene,” I said and shut the door in his face.

  Chapter 21

  “We’re out of the salmon,” the chef said as I entered the kitchen. I swore, because I’d just put in an order for a party of four, half of whom had ordered the salmon.

  After last night, I was trying to focus on my job rather than the number of vampire problems currently plaguing me: Cazimir’s coma, Fiona’s grudge, the second vampire who was undoubtedly after me. It was all too much, and I was doing my damnedest to focus on the small irritations, like the kitchen running out of the Catch of the Day.

  “After my table seventeen or including theirs?” I asked.

  The chef behind the line counted tickets. “Including,” he said. “Get them to order something else.”

  “Goddamn it,” I hissed, not bothering to check the cold window for their salads, which was why I’d gone back there in the first place.

  I raced back to table seventeen to give them the bad news. It was almost nine o’clock and I’d been cut from the floor. The final tables coming in the door were going to Megan, the closing server, so seventeen was my last table to order. Of course it couldn’t go smoothly. Luckily, they were amicable about it and the people who’d ordered salmon happily changed their orders to something else.

  By the time my tables were cashed out and my sidework was done, I was ready to strip off my heels and get the hell out of there. I ran into Max in the break room. He was texting his boyfriend, making plans.

>   “Want a ride up the Hill?” I asked. I was going to go park my car close to home before I did anything else. Secretly, I was hoping to find Sean in or around my apartment, but if he wasn’t there, I’d go to Underground and ask if anyone had seen or heard from Fiona. It was a long shot, but after sitting around my apartment alone last night feeling useless, I had to do something.

  “Nah. Think I might head to Javi’s,” Max said, unable to hold back his grin when he said the name. It was cute, in a puppy love kind of way. “What about you? Hot date?”

  I snorted. “With a hot bath and a bottle of wine, maybe.”

  “What happened to that lady who waited for you in the bar last week?”

  He meant Eva, and I thought for a moment. I hadn’t seen Eva in a while. I didn’t like that she had vanished after posting her video. It made me wonder what the hell her angle was. After all, if all she’d wanted was thirty-six seconds of footage of me in the sunlight, she’d have had no reason to lurk outside my apartment in the dark or follow me around Pioneer Square. It made me curious, not for the first time, if she really was a Weeper who wanted the Cure or something else.

  “She and I are not a thing,” I said. “Never were.”

  “Shame. She had nice legs.”

  I rolled my eyes at Max and closed my locker. “If that was my only requirement in a date, I’d never have time for myself.”

  Max laughed and went back to his texting. I headed out.

  Clouds had moved in with a cool breeze and the air was humid. It would probably rain later tonight.

  When I got to the parking lot where my car was parked, a little way up the road from the restaurant, I heard a weird shuffling sound and saw shadows moving behind the cars. The lot was maybe half-full, mostly of my coworkers’ cars, and mine was near the back, away from the others. As I got closer, I expected to see a dog or a deer or maybe even a coyote race out from behind the second-to-last row of cars, where the noise was coming from.

  Instead, I turned the corner and found a woman bleeding to death.

  She sat on the dirty pavement, struggling to stand up with one hand at her throat. Her throat had been cut and blood was gushing everywhere. It stained her chin and shirt and arms. She opened her mouth when she saw me, maybe to scream, but all that came out was a watery gasp.

  I rushed to her side. The gash in her throat was only a few inches long but it had hit the artery.

  She grabbed the sleeve of my white work blouse, staining it crimson with her blood smeared fingers. “Henri,” she gasped.

  I froze at the sound of my name, unsure I’d heard her correctly. I looked at her face. She was in her thirties, maybe, and had brown eyes. She looked vaguely familiar. She might have been one of the Factory mortals, but I couldn’t be sure.

  “Hold on,” I said. I pulled off my now-ruined shirt, thankful that I wore a tank top underneath it. I started tearing the shirt apart to make a bandage.

  She said something else, but I couldn’t make out the words. Maybe it was just a growl or a sound of frustration. She let go of her throat. She hadn’t really been holding in blood anyhow. She clawed up at me. “I’m trying to make a bandage,” I told her.

  She made a sound that was hard to describe, a wet, sickly whimper. Then she passed out. I was still tearing a strip of bandage from my shirt when I saw her body go slack. I felt for a pulse in her wrist. There wasn’t one.

  I balled up my shirt and shoved it into my purse. Bandages were not going to save this woman. Nothing was.

  With a sigh, I shoved my fingers into the wound at her throat and coated them in her warm, sticky blood. It tasted like iron and heat on my tongue.

  The vision exploded into my mind. In it, the woman was being led through a parking lot. She said it was a weird place to “do it.” She was scared, more scared than she thought she’d be. Terrified. The person ahead of her was impatient, a dark shadow, moving to the back of the lot. She wondered if there was a car here they were going to get into, so they could go somewhere else, somewhere more appropriate for making a vampire. And then suddenly the vampire vanished from where he stood in front of her and moved behind her, holding a knife to her throat. The blade was cold against her neck.

  “Now Henri will find you,” a voice said. But the vision was watery and the voice was muddled. I could understand the words but not identify the speaker.

  The woman fell to the ground, choking as blood spurted out of her neck. She watched black boots walk away. She put her hands to her neck and they came away sticky. Every pump of her heart sprayed blood all over.

  And then she saw a woman. This must be Henri, she thought. She tried to speak, to beg for help, but everything was too hazy, her tongue too thick.

  I jolted back. The vision was vague, but they were all vague. Sensations, feelings. I’d seen more than I usually saw, but most of it was still impressions, feelings, and final thoughts more than actual sights or sounds.

  I shuddered at the way my name had been one of this woman’s last thoughts, and how her violent end had been for me. A demonstration. A fucked-up piece of performance art. But what the fuck was the point? That was the problem with these random deaths. None of them made any goddamn sense.

  And then I saw the envelope. It was sticking out of her jeans pocket, up over her shirt. It was smeared with blood but I could clearly read my name, Henri Dunn, in gorgeous calligraphy. My hand shook as I picked up the envelope. And then I heard footsteps.

  “Hey! Your car is still here!” Max came jogging up toward the row of cars that hid me and the corpse. “Javi’s having his book club over and I just cannot deal with that many people right n—”

  His words cut off as he came around the corner. I was leaning over the dead woman, blood on my hands, my mouth, my chest. It was smeared all over my white tank top. I must have looked like the infernal creature I used to be.

  “What the holy fuck?” Max said. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”

  “Call 9-1-1,” I said urgently, though I knew damn well it was too late. That was what humans did, right? They called for help. They didn’t try to fix it themselves, to make bandages out of their clothes. They called for other humans, experienced humans.

  I hadn’t felt less human in a long damn time.

  “What did you do?” Max screeched, the last word hitting soprano notes.

  “Nothing! I found her like this. She needs help! Call 9-1-1,” I repeated.

  Max was staring at me, and something inside me cracked. Max saw me. Not the human waitress me who snarked about asshole customers and complained about special orders. Not the drinking buddy who would share a bottle of wine and a basket of cheese fries.

  He saw the real me. The monster. Henrietta Dunn, vampire. Immortal. Killer.

  I was still that creature, just stuffed into an inconvenient human costume, and now Max knew it. There was no taking it back.

  “Call!” I yelled.

  That shook him enough to pull out his phone. I turned toward my car.

  “Where are you going?” Max demanded.

  “Somewhere important. If you want to do me a favor, say you found the woman alone. That I was already gone.”

  Max met my eyes but his were so full of horror, I had to look away. I wanted so badly to be the monster he saw and yet, I hadn’t wanted my only friend to know what I was. He’d been an anchor in the icy sea of mortality. Now I’d lost him.

  “Why?” he asked. “What the hell is going on?”

  “Call for help, Max,” I said, and turned my back on him.

  I drove away, pulling out onto the street. An ambulance raced past me about a mile later.

  If Max told them the truth, I wouldn’t have a job or a life to go back to. I’d have to move, change my name, be someone else again.

  I could worry about that later. I pulled off into an empty parking lot and opened the envelope.

  Inside was an invitation, the kind people sent for weddings. A cream-colored card with the phrase “You Are Cordially Invited” preprinted
at the top. The card had an address on it and nothing else. Subtle.

  Also, cheesy and ridiculous. It couldn’t be Fiona’s style. She’d struck as more the “write a message in blood on your windshield” type.

  But it didn’t really matter who it was. They’d brutally murdered a woman for no reason other than to get my attention. Now they had it and I was going to stop them, even if it meant walking into their trap.

  Chapter 22

  I plugged the address into my GPS and it led me to an abandoned warehouse out in SODO, past CenturyLink Field and Safeco Field, where the modern-day industrial buildings resided. The Factory came from a time when Pioneer Square was the center of logging and industry in Seattle, before the Great Fire. This warehouse was a newer building and had probably closed up recently.

  “No Trespassing” signs were posted on every corner. More signs warned that I was being recorded, though I could see the cameras had all been disabled or taken out altogether, leaving only fraying wires sticking out of black holders. One camera lay broken on the steps of the entrance.

  I’d left my purse in my car. I held my Taser and had shoved the stake in my pocket, grateful that these work slacks had deep pockets that were rarely found and always treasured in women’s apparel. Besides my keys, that was it.

  I’d called Sean and when he hadn’t picked up—where the hell was he, anyway?—I’d texted him the address and told him whoever wanted me dead was hanging out there, and that I was going to crash their party.

  The fact that he hadn’t responded to that told me his phone was off, or maybe he’d forgotten to charge it. He did that sometimes. Because he used it so rarely, he would often fail to realize the reason it wasn’t beeping at him was that the battery was dead.

  I took a deep breath and remembered the sheer terror in Max’s eyes. I was a monster, goddamn it. Neha’s poison couldn’t take that away from me, and neither could Fiona or anyone else.