“My boyfriend cheated on me with my best friend,” I finally said.
“So the pain chased you off?”
“Not pain. I needed some space to breathe. The pain theory is Doris’s area of expertise,” I said, and he raised his eyebrows questioningly.
“Ah, it doesn’t matter.” I shooed the thought away with my hand, but he kept waiting for the answer. Damn!
“Doris thinks that I was really hurt by that whole thing, more so than I am admitting to myself; so, since I’m in denial, mentally, my body is having extreme reactions to men when they get physically close to me,” I said, thinking that his earlier nude proximity had totally beaten her theory.
“I thought it was something like that.”
I frowned. “And I think that both of you have too much spare time.”
“So what happened last night?” he finally asked. I had been thinking about it the whole day and still couldn’t find any explanation.
“I don’t know. How did it seem to you?”
“You marked me as your enemy and you wanted to rip my head off.”
I was shocked.
“You showed a surprising ability.”
“What, the ability to bite?” I tried to make a joke, but my gaze fell.
“No. You showed the fighting instinct. You absolutely lack technique, but you were still ready for anything. I didn’t know you had it in you. I thought you were all ‘Miss Peace-in-the-World.’ ”
“But I am.”
“Oh, I don’t think so. You’re hungry for blood and battle,” he laughed.
“Don’t form ideas based on one angry moment.”
“Actually it’s two moments, the kick to my face and now the bite.” His tone was teasing. “So what’s causing the anger?”
Gee, I don’t know—you? Then I remembered Simona’s voice coming from his room.
“Nothing,” was my ingenious answer.
“What is causing that rage?” he persisted, but I looked away at my monitor, saving my files. “We won’t have training tonight.”
“Okay,” I said, leaving the office.
I joined Tibor at lunch.
“Hey Lamb, your steak is getting bloodier,” he grinned, looking in my plate. I didn’t reply.
“So, how’s work?”
“Better than the rest of my day,” I said, and he gave me an odd look.
“The rest is usually boring,” I added.
“Oh, that. Well, get a hobby!”
I scowled, which made him laugh, which made me want to punch him in the face.
What?! Punch him? Really, what was my problem?! Was this some delayed reaction to an “I-am-in-a-vampire-den” syndrome?
“Have you felt any changes in yourself after coming to this place?” I asked.
“You mean something like that exasperation of yours?”
“Yeah, like that.” He laughed again; thankfully I had no more desire to punch. “I often feel anxiety, then annoyance—even violence sometimes. Those things are only seem to be getting stronger.”
“I don’t know. Maybe you don’t dig the climate, California girl.”
He was in the mood to joke around, apparently; I looked down at my plate.
“Okay, if it means something to you, I didn’t notice any particular changes in myself or the other Inquirers. Of course, all of this changes you in some way, but not as dramatically as you might think.” He paused, and then added, “If it gets too rough, there’s a shrink here . . . maybe some meds as well . . . .”
Okay, Tibor was being helpful, but a shrink? C’mon.
I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Blake.
“Guess what was waiting for me in my room?”
“Twin Playboy bunnies?” I replied and Tibor choked. Even some people around us turned to look.
“Very funny!” He held a metallic gray USB flash drive. “Compliments of Mr. Baldur.”
“Oh, cool!”
“Yup. I’m guessing it’s the tests we wanted; I didn’t want to open it without you. Andrei Belun said I could find you here.”
“So are you free?”
“Like a bird, my friend.”
“Great, I can’t wait to check this out.”
“By the way, your office is cool,” Blake added.
“Why, what’s it like?” Tibor had finally stopped laughing.
“Not like ours, and her desk is next to the team leader’s.”
Actually, it was across from it, but never mind. I didn’t get why they were so interested.
“Really?” Tibor’s eyes widened in surprise.
“Yeah, why? What are your offices like?”
“We’re down with the guards. Upper offices are only for team leaders. It’s the same for all of us.”
“Then I guess Belun has some additional qualities besides being a great Warrior; he’s apparently showing some egalitarian tendencies. Or . . . he gets bored writing reports alone,” I said, thinking of myself downstairs with Lee and Jacob. And since they were rarely there it would’ve been me alone in that sterile white space. Thank God I was with Belun in his nice office.
“Has anyone heard from Julia yet?” I asked, but they shook their heads.
“She’s probably taking a whole week off,” Tibor said, and the breath left my lungs. I missed her, and the suite was way too big without her.
“Shall we?” Blake asked, and the two of us soon were off to his room.
Tibor and Blake also shared a suite. Their common room looked more like a bar than a real room, with a huge wooden bar loaded with different types of beverages, two glass tables, a sofa, and three colorful beanbag chairs. I liked it. If our suite called for a movie night, theirs screamed: Par-tay!!
“Like what you did with the place.”
“Thanks, it was mostly Tibor.”
“It’s cool.”
We went into his room. I hadn’t been in another Inquirer’s room. His was different from mine. The bed was on other side, no huge closets, a long desk with a microscope and a few other pieces of lab equipment on them. There were a bunch of books scattered around, along with papers and some notebooks and pens.
“Sorry for the chaos.”
“Don’t worry, my room’s always a mess,” as my Mom always liked to say. “You made yourself a nice little geek den,” I added smiling.
“You’re always welcome.” He placed one more chair next to his computer.
“And just when I was bitching to Tibor about how bored I was,” I said.
“Did he tell you to find a hobby?” Blake laughed. “He told me the same thing when I arrived.”
“Bastard,” I laughed. “And what’s his hobby anyway?”
“Games and girls.”
“Games?”
“Mmm hmmm, he’s made a space shuttle out of his room with all the high tech stuff he has. Plus, he loves playing video games.”
How mature, I thought.
“What about you? Anything else besides this project?” I asked, and he indicated his books and science stuff.
“Astrophysics, at the moment.”
“Cool.”
Baldur had kept his word. When we opened the USB key, all of our names were there. “Open mine, I’ll know if something’s missing,” I offered. He did. “No censorship. Everything’s in its place. So, what do we do now?”
“We classify it by file type. I’ve got this new software that works as a database and gives statistics. Stuff like repeated words, meanings . . . stuff like that.”
“Oh, I thought we’d be flipping through hundreds of pages. You just screwed my hobby,” I said.
“Sorry,” he said, smiling, “but this will give us more information than we could pull out of looking though papers alone. However, we’ll still skim through the data and connect the dots. Your hobby is still intact.”
“It was more fun in my head.”
“Going through hundreds of pages? What century do you live in?”
“That’s a good question.”
I
started clicking with the mouse. Over and over again. It was super boring, but still, it made time pass.
“Did you know that vamps share the same blood type?” I asked.
“Mmm hmm, and it doesn’t belong to the ABO blood group system,” he answered. “Do you know what blood type they were before conservation?”
I shook my head. This could be interesting.
“AB negative.”
“Really? That’s my blood type.” I knew that it was rare among regular blood types, but the fact I shared it with vamps-to-be was a novelty. Blake laughed.
“Mine is A-negative.”
“You’d go over well in Japan.”
“That’s what they say.”
“Do you know the name of a famous vamp Judas?” I asked my eyebrows up, daring.
He looked bewildered. “You mean the Priest?”
“Yup.”
“I haven’t found that information. In books he’s always described by some biblical metaphors and not by his name.”
“It’s not in the books,” I grinned slyly. “His name is Doroteo.”
His look was priceless.
“And by some weird chance, it means ‘gift from god,’ ” I added.
“Where do you get those things?! More friends ready to talk?”
“Actually, this came from Tertius.”
He knew who I meant; there were only four Latin numbers that held such heavy importance in this place.
“So you really started out well with your Vocati.”
“And what does your working day look like?” I asked.
“My Vocati calls himself Hades. Dramatic, right?”
Greek God of the Underworld? Yeah, I’d say.
“I ran into him on the way to school. I stopped, apologizing, and then I noticed the handcuffs. But I was in a hurry so I went on. You see, I had received a phone call from the school about my sister, and I wanted to sort things out before my parents came home. A year and a half later, some guy approached me saying they had been looking for me since the day that I pushed him.”
“Was your sister okay?”
“Yeah, she had gotten into a fight with some girl. She was in third grade. After I arrived here,” he continued, “we didn’t talk much, my Vocati and me. There were some words but nothing important, and it was an extremely boring four hours. I think he got so bored that we finally started communicating. We worked on crosswords together, which was Tibor’s suggestion, by the way. Now, we talk more, but it’s still general stuff. I cannot place myself in the position of Inquirer, and there’s no way he’d answer any straight question from me. Actually, only Gustavo has established the role that is expected from us. It is hard to make them talk, and when they do it’s on their terms, not yours. They see us as a way to pass time, and we don’t have any authority over them.”
“So, it’s like talking to an acquaintance.”
“Sort of. How’s it going for you?”
“There’s a lot of silence, but we talk. I’d kill myself if I had to sit in silence the entire time.”
“I brought books with me, and I’d tell him about the interesting parts so he could feel engaged, but that was when we didn’t speak much. If you’re too scared, Lyndon has some pills that can help.”
“Honestly, I was more frightened of those first few weeks in this place than I was when I was alone with him. Wait, what pills?”
“Chill pills.”
“Hasn’t she gotten used to her Vocati by now?” I asked.
“Well, it’s kind of hard in her case.”
“What do you mean?” Will someone please tell me what is up with that girl already?
“You know, most of us kind of stumble upon our Vocati. That wasn’t her case. Lyndon was visiting her grandparents in the countryside with her family when the attack happened. A Vocati entered their house creating a massacre, soon afterwards, two vamp Warriors arrived that had been tracking him. While they were handcuffing him, he talked to a girl hiding in the corner. That was Lyndon, and she was the only survivor.”
I was completely startled. That was a really tough story. As tough as Lena’s. My God.
“Don’t tell me that her Vocati is the one that slaughtered her family?”
“Thus the meds.”
“But how could she . . . ?”
“How could she accept this job? Trust me that was the biggest struggle I’ve ever seen. The girl was a mess for months. We did our best to make it easy on her, to help her, but after what she had witnessed, there’s not much help left. If you haven’t noticed, she sometimes avoids Julia. It’s because Julia’s way of paying attention reminds her too much of her mother . . .”
No wonder the girl was bitter and grumpy.
“When she signed the contract, Tibor told me that she had decided that she wanted to help the vamps destroy all the Vocati—and that she couldn’t imagine a life without the memory of her parent’s murder. Also, she didn’t want to live alone.”
My throat got dry at the thought of her pain.
“Poor girl,” I said.
“Oh, don’t let her hear that… She gets moody.”
Chapter 12
Wellness
The two of us agreed to meet again the next day. Until then, Blake would sort the results gained from our information upload, so I headed to my room. My body wanted to move and I was sorry there’s no the training that night. Why had Belun canceled in the first place? Did my previous day’s savageness have something to do with it? I wondered what he was doing instead.
I opted to run, doubling everything I normally did, speed and exercises; finally, there was some visible improvement. I could endure more, run faster, and I had definitely gained strength. After all that, I took a blissful hot shower. I stayed in until it turned into a steam room, my thoughts full of hot tubs.
Later, I remembered to check up on the Lolo moth. Since I’d forgotten the Latin name, I couldn’t find it at first; but when I finally did, the picture was stunning. This was a moth? It looked prettier than most butterflies I’d seen. Matthews said denizens called it “the royal spirit,” and it really did look special. Nothing like what I was expecting. What was that I also wanted to check? Right. “Bela Lugosi’s dead.” I found some great video options on the Net, Bauhaus, and Nouvelle Vague. And even though the original was great, the one with a female singer was awesome! Especially with the creepy bell tower ringing at the beginning. I put it on repeat while searching for gifts for Julia and Doris, which turned out to be pretty unsuccessful.
The next day, after running, I headed for Blake’s place. It was Saturday, a free day, and it seemed colder than usual.
“There’s so much data, I don’t know what will come out of it,” he said, giving me my copy, a bound pile of papers.
“Wow.” I was looking at dozens of pages finely printed with statistics regarding the repetition rate of words and numbers. After that came a similar analysis of full sentences, by way of the same procedure.
“Last night I leafed through it, throwing away some common words and sentences.”
“I found that song you mentioned… ‘Bela Lugosi’s dead’.”
“Ha, how did you remember that?” He smiled.
“Honestly, I’d never heard of it before,” I laughed, and we turned back to looking at boring linguistic-statistic data. I wondered how much creativity would be necessary to shape all of this into something remotely coherent. Then my phone rang.
“Hey, hon.” It was Doris’s voice. “Get ready.”
“What for?”
“We are going to a divine place. To an oasis in the middle of the desert, or, in our case—a luxury wellness weekend in an arctic climate.”
“I’m so in!” I said, thinking of my hot tub fantasies.
“Aidan and I will pick you up in an hour.”
“See you!”
Mmm, luxurious weekend. Yeah, baby.
“Plans?” Blake asked.
“Wellness paradise. Wanna come?”
�
��Sounds tempting, but I’ve already made some plans. I guess it’s that new place near Oslo.”
“Wouldn’t know. Doris has a habit of keeping me in the dark.”
Fortunately, this time she had at least given me an hour to pack my stuff, and, scanning my closet, a little black dress practically screamed at me. I hadn’t worn it before; it was short and tight, with a deep V cut and ¾ length sleeves. It was pretty and sexy, but not vulgar like Simona’s. I wore my Converse, but brought the stiletto boots with me. Lip gloss and mascara found their way into my purse as well.
Mia and Doris were waiting for me in the car.
“What happened to Aidan?”
“He went someplace with Belun. We’ll meet them at the airport,” Doris said.
“Airport?”
“Mmm hmm, we’re going to check out a new place near Oslo.”
So, Blake was right. “Who’s coming?”
“Probably everyone from the last trip,” Mia answered.
I guessed that meant Belun too.
“So Mia, how’s your search for the Tin man?” I asked, and they laughed.
“Only cans so far.”
I wondered if she’d ever had a boyfriend before; had she been in love? Then Simona’s face pushed into my thoughts, and I realized that she was probably going to be there too. Swell. I still didn’t know if she was here because of the reception, or if she actually had some role with the Council and compound.
There was a bunch of people waiting for us at the airport. They were mostly all from the last trip, about fifteen people. When I spied Belun, he was already looking in my direction. We approached him and Aidan.
“Hey guys,” I said casually, and Doris found a comfortable place in her beau’s arms. Belun mocked Mia about Tin man, and I noticed Set with his twin . . . and Simona. What was Set’s sister’s name? Right, Feodora, and it sounded so beautiful. When he saw me looking, Set gave me a killer grin and a waved, which caught Simona’s attention, and soon enough her witch’s eyes were on me. I waved back, successfully ignoring her. When I turned back to my group, Belun’s sharp gaze was waiting for me. It seemed really intense, but he quickly moved it. But that didn’t stop me from feeling uneasy. What was wrong with him?
Heading toward the plane, he walked near me; only then did I hear Bryn’s voice somewhere in the back. Good, she was here too.
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