“I think that’s Winston-Salem,” Bobby said. “North Carolina.”
I covered my own smile and looked around. I saw what Marcy meant. The mall consisted of a Thai restaurant, T-shirt and souvenir shops, and some kiosks of bling and things, but everything else was Halloween-themed, even though we were only at the tail end of September. It was like Christmas carols blasted before Thanksgiving or Easter bunnies in August. The goth gang from my first-ever mission would have loved it. I felt a little pang of loss. Somehow, they’d gotten under my skin, like a sentimental splinter.
“There it is,” I called, spotting the place Hunter had told us about. The Morbid Gift Shop. Inside it was dark, but not so dark that we couldn’t see the old-fashioned punishment cage with a full skeleton inside, an arm hanging through the bars as though it had died begging for a hand-out.
“Cool!” Nelson said. “Let’s go in.”
We pushed through the door, and the humans among us let their eyes adjust. Nelson looked right past the browsing customers and made for the display of skulls and potions on the far wall. I had to remind myself he’d been a teenaged vampire lifestyler before he became a Cro-Magnon vamp dude with an overabundance of jawline and a body like someone had merged a linebacker with Lurch from The Addams Family.
In addition to the cage, the gift shop’s collection of the macabre included a life-sized coffin set atop a wooden cart displayed in the window catty-corner to where we’d entered. Brent accidentally brushed up against it when he moved out of the way of a bevy of browsers squeezing past him toward the door. He flinched as he made contact, which was totally weird. Sure, Brent could read the histories of things with a bare touch, but bare was the operative word. He knew better. Except for his face, he had everything covered: dark-wash jeans, navy pea coat, gloves, and watch cap.
Marcy took him in hand, and since he was her boyfriend, thus her problem, I let myself get distracted by a display of bling, which on closer examination turned out to be shrunken heads, bats, and sparkly spiders. The fashionista in me did a little recoil. In my mind, the line should be drawn at bejeweled bugs. More intriguing were the black velvet chokers the next rack over with garnet drops (or pretty good imitations thereof) cascading from the side, as though to simulate the blood dripping from vampire bites. As if we’d be so wasteful. Still, they were pretty, and I thought what better way to hide being a vamp than to go around looking like a victim? Maybe I could convince the others to part with some funds in the name of blending in.
“May I help you?” asked a voice, nearly in my ear. I jumped, like a half inch, just enough to play girly, because, really, I’d totally seen him coming.
I put a hand to my heart and looked up at him through long, dark, perfectly natural lashes. It was a stunner not to have to look up too far. At five foot nothin’, I was used to four-inch heels or a permanent crick in the neck.
“Yes, thank you.” I answered, returning a choker to the rack. “We’re looking for Donato.”
The guy who’d snuck up eyed me with heavily kohl-lined eyes. He wasn’t just under-tall, he was celery-stalk thin on top of it. His pants were black, baggy, and overly pocketed. A chain dangled from a belt loop to his back pocket, probably linked up to a wallet, making me wonder how painful it must be for him to sit. His T-shirt had a graphic of a dove-gray skull with a diamondback snake weaving in and out of the eye sockets, providing the only spot of color in an otherwise monochromatic ensemble. In short, his outfit was consistent with what all the cool goth guys were wearing this season.
I was in stealth hottie mode myself, which is to say I’d had to leave all my couture behind when we went on the run. I was currently rocking a girly version of a sports tee—a pale blue scoop-neck with white piping around the neck and down the sleeves and the number eighty-eight emblazoned across my chest. I had no idea what it stood for, but the shirt clung to me in all the right places. My mother would have needed a Valium if she’d ever learned I’d shopped off the rack … at a rest stop, no less … but beggars/choosers and all that jazz.
“You’re friends with Donato?” he asked, like he doubted it.
“More like family, really.”
He cocked an eyebrow, spiky piercing rising all the way to his hairline.
“Hunter sent us,” I added.
“You’re going to have to be more specific.”
“From Tampa.” Geez, you wouldn’t think the name “Hunter” would be so hot with pretend vampires, although I supposed it beat “Slayer.”
“Well then.” He smiled, and that “Schizophrenic Psycho” song from the radio went through my head. If we were here on one of our super-spy missions, he’d be at the very top of my watch list. “Follow me.”
We all followed him to the curtained archway at the back of the store that I’d been too distracted by bling to attend to before. Psycho had probably come straight through that curtain when he’d snuck up on me. Okay, maybe it was unfair of me to think of him that way. I didn’t actually know he was a psycho. Vamps didn’t have an app for that.
“I didn’t catch your name,” I said as he pushed aside a heavy black curtain. It had to be sound-muffling or surely we’d have twigged to the fact that there was a whole performance, audience and all, going on in the back.
“Chip,” he whispered, so as not to disrupt the show.
“Chip—really?” I asked, just as quietly.
“Yeah, like the one on your shoulder,” he answered. “Now, shhh.”
Oh, sure, I was the one with a chip on my shoulder.
But I hushed, mostly because I wanted to catch what was happening on stage. I moved aside so the others could get in, and we ended up lining the wall between the theater area and the gift shop. If our entrance disrupted the show, we couldn’t tell. On stage—well, at floor-level in front of the rows of filled seats—was a tall man dressed all in black but for a white poet shirt complete with ruffles. His jacket was an old-timey cut, like something out of A Christmas Carol. His black hair was long and framed a vampire-pale face. Ice-blue eyes too cool for reality challenged the audience to see through the illusion that he was performing. The probable illusion—we’d seen enough real magic to know that it existed. But could books really bleed? Color me skeptical. I sniffed. Well, if they did bleed, it was stage blood. My fangs stayed sheathed. Anyway, I preferred practical magic, like the kind that zapped zits on contact.
My gaze wandered, but only got as far as the assistant striding to center stage to remove the bleeding book. There was something familiar about the assistant, which was not at all a comforting thought. If Donato looked like something out of Charles Dickens, his partner was a character out of Oliver Twist. Wait, was that still Dickens? Anyway, he had those scruffy fingerless gloves on, a shabby coat, a cap pulled low at a jaunty angle, and a half-mask, like on all the posters I’d ever seen for The Phantom of the Opera. I couldn’t see enough for him to remind me of anyone, so why was I so sure … something in his walk? He was cocky and confident, tall but not freakishly so. I felt a weird flutter in the pit of my stomach.
I was so taken with the mystery man that I missed what triggered all the applause, but suddenly the audience was in a frenzy of appreciation, and Donato was bowing his thanks. I’d missed the finale, whatever it was.
Marcy had to nudge me with her elbow to move me away from the wall so that we could let the audience out past us.
Donato and his assistant remained on stage, greeting a few friends and admirers who’d hung behind. I and my minions stepped behind the stragglers, not calling attention to ourselves, but I felt the assistant’s stare on me anyway. If this wasn’t one of those lust-at-first-sight moments when you catch a stranger’s eye across a crowded room, we had a problem. If he had any connection to the fangs or Feds who were after us, we’d be in big, big trouble. Possibly even fatal.
Marcy looked from the masked man to me and back. “You know him?” she whispered.
There was something about the way those eyes sparked and glinted, something
about the quirk to the one side of his lips that I could see … “Maybe,” I whispered back.
“Introduce me?”
I nudged her with my hip. “You’re taken.”
“So are you,” she pointed out, not wrongly.
I tore my gaze away just as the last of the stragglers let out a hearty laugh and moved on. As the exit/entryway curtain closed behind them, Donato turned his ice-blue eyes on us. His assistant reached up to remove his hat with one hand and his mask with the other, and flipped his hair back to reveal a truly breathtaking sight—Ulric, my goth guy from New York. Nosy. Insufferable. Blood like mulled cider. Here, in the flesh.
2
Donato stirred his coffee, apparently perfectly okay with being out in public in full costume. Except for those who greeted him as he entered, no one in the well-filled café gave him a second glance. The woman at the coffee counter had known his order without even asking. It arrived in a cup the size of a swimming pool and had some kind of mystic spiral swirled into the foam. Ulric and Eric had opted for plain black coffee, and the rest of us, except for Brent, who still looked oddly shaky and alert, went drinkless. I wasn’t thirsty … for coffee. Not that I could drink it anyway. But if bleeding books didn’t do it for me, Ulric certainly did, and my fangs had been at half-mast ever since he’d ripped off his mask. I’d tasted him once back on that very first mission. I’d needed the blood so very badly, and he was there. And willing. And, okay, hot. But even though we were bloodsuckers, and Bobby should understand—hell, he’d made me that way—I knew he wouldn’t.
Ulric had taken care to arrange things so that he’d sit beside me. I made sure not to look at him, for fear something would show on my face. Then I feared the lack of eye contact would be telling and glanced up when I thought I’d felt his attention shift. I was wrong. Immediately our eyes met, aventurine green (mine) to topaz (his).
Ulric leaned toward me. “I knew you couldn’t stay away.”
“Oh yeah, like I knew you’d be here. If anything, you’re a total liability for me. Maybe I should just take you out.”
“I’m free tonight,” he said, eyes twinkling, just as they’d done right through the mask.
“Not in the fun way,” I hissed, exasperated.
He gave me a slow, intimate grin, and I had to look away … straight into Bobby’s frowny face. I debated sticking my tongue out at him, because I was totally my own person and he had no say in it if every once in a while I got my head a little turned by some stone-cold hottie. I wasn’t dead … well, except maybe in the technical sense. To stake his claim, Bobby blew me a kiss across the table.
Ulric couldn’t help but notice. Yet, undeterred, he leaned in close, his mouth right up next to my ear to ask, “You’re here because of that girl, aren’t you?”
It wasn’t exactly the sweet nothing I’d been expecting, which meant the intimacy part was completely for Bobby’s benefit.
I pulled away from him. “What girl?”
“The one who was murdered last night,” Ulric answered, watching me with those deep amber eyes to see if I was playing him with my ignorance. I half-wondered if he was some kind of human lie-detector. I’d met one before, and Ulric had nearly blown my cover back in New York when he’d figured me out.
“We’re not here about any girl,” I said honestly.
“Ah, then it must be my wolfish charm. I knew it!”
I punched him in the arm, but that only got me a grin as wolfish as previously advertised.
Bobby wasn’t the only one watching us. Brent looked like he’d tried to eat a lemon whole. I knew it was bad that I’d been recognized, but I didn’t see what I could do about it at the moment. Maybe we’d decide we had to move on. Maybe we wouldn’t. After all, Ulric hadn’t given me away the last time. He’d even helped me on my mission. His leer said that he might be willing to do so again.
A hand reached across me into Ulric’s line of vision, flashing long, shapely nails in Plum Passion. “Since Gina’s too rude to introduce us, I’ll have to do it for myself,” Marcy purred. “I’m Marcy, her BFF.”
Real names? Was she crazy? Second thought, silly question.
“Marley,” I said with emphasis.
Ulric took her hand, and instead of shaking, pressed his lips to it. “Enchanted,” he said, staring deeply into her eyes and then sliding a glance toward me, as if to see whether I was jealous. So not.
“I can’t believe Gia didn’t tell me all about you,” Marcy said, emphasizing right back for good measure.
Apparently, the only people who weren’t fascinated by Ulric were Eric and Nelson, who were deep in conversation with Donato about his act. Eric, who had a very special gift for gadgetry, was trying to wheedle out of Donato some of the tricks of the trade, and Donato was staying mysteriously mum. I didn’t think Eric would appreciate me wrecking the flow of his interrogation, but it was getting late and we needed to figure out a place to stay, if indeed we were staying and my reunion with Ulric hadn’t compromised us all.
Even if it had … Bobby could probably find a way to fade Ulric’s memories of me or something. We didn’t have many more options. Being on the run meant that we couldn’t access our bank accounts or credit cards without leading our pursuers right to us. We only had the funds that’d been on us when we bolted, which meant we were bottoming out on cash. New identities would cost us an arm and a leg, and while the vamps among us might be super healers, I wasn’t totally sure whether our bodies would regrow the appendages or just smooth over the stumps. And I was totally not willing to experiment.
“You all right?” Ulric asked, no doubt catching the odd look on my face. Also, no doubt deciding it had something to do with him. Gah, men.
“Yeah, just … it’s late. We still don’t have a place to stay. Plus, you weren’t supposed to be here. You can absolutely not, on penalty of death, tell any of the old gang that we’re here. Or let anyone know that you knew me … before.”
“I’m pretty sure Donato’s figured it out,” Ulric said helpfully.
Hearing his name, Donato finally looked up from his conversation and I was able to catch Eric’s eye. I didn’t have my boy Bobby’s mental messaging system, but Eric nodded anyway like he totally got it.
“So, Donato,” Eric began, “Hunter said you’d find us a place to stay and help us get established?”
Donato seemed to size us all up before turning those frosty eyes back on Eric. “Hunter also said you might not mind a bargain?”
Eric didn’t look a bit sure about that, but he nodded.
“Then I’ve got just the place for you.”
• • •
We drove a little way down the road, to the nearby town of Danvers, and were now standing in front of an old brick building with arched windows on the first floor and smallish barred windows the rest of the way up. It looked like it had once been an institutional building of some sort—governmental, maybe, the kind of place where an office party meant that you took the cake back to your cubicle to eat. But the sign outside said Ravenswood Apartments.
“Wow, this is … grim,” Brent said, eying the place as we waited for Donato to open the outer doors.
Ulric, thankfully, had been sent back to clean up at the shop and get everything ready for the next day’s show, but he’d left with a wink and a promise that we’d meet again. Bobby bristled. He and I held hands now as we stood in the cold, the breeze blowing my dark hair across my face, nearly blinding me. I tucked it behind an ear, but it insisted on escape.
“Well, just wait,” Donato insisted. “The place used to be a psychiatric facility, way back when. Actually, it only closed in the 1970s when certain, um, problems came to light. It was shut down for a while, but a few years ago a developer got ahold of it and turned it into apartments. It’s been completely revamped and refurbished. Very modern.”
“So what’s the catch?” Eric asked. “You don’t rent out brand new apartments at discount prices.”
“They’ve had a little trou
ble filling one or two of the basement units—not enough natural light and all.” He had the outer doors open and hurried on with his spiel as if to discourage more questions. “The lobby door is always locked. Residents have to buzz visitors in. It’s very secure.”
The lobby was well-lit and lined with marble … or faux marble. I was no expert. At least not as far as nonwearable rocks, but give me precious or semi-precious stones any day of the week … seriously. Not just an expression.
He led us down a set of stairs toward the basement, still talking, but I’d lost track and anyway, it was clear he wasn’t getting to the heart of things. “Uh huh,” I cut in. “What aren’t you telling us?”
Donato looked back at me and then away again with a shrug. “The place might be haunted. If you believe in that sort of thing.”
“Says the guy who makes books bleed,” I muttered. “What else? For some people, a haunting might just add a little thrill.”
“Guess we haven’t found the right kind of people.” With a flourish, he whipped open the door we’d come to and flicked on the lights. We all pushed in to see a spacious unit. There were almost-immediate steps down to a sunken living room, complete with couch, coffee table, and empty entertainment center.
“It’s mostly furnished,” Donato said unnecessarily.
“It came furnished or the last tenants abandoned it, stuff and all?” I asked.
“Does it matter?”
I’d have given him a hells yeah but Brent got there first. “This doesn’t feel right,” he said, a funny sound to his voice, almost like he was speaking through a long tube, even though he was right there beside us. He’d been funny ever since we’d first gotten into town. Or at least since we’d first exited the van and entered the mall. Marcy raised a hand to rub his back and he actually flinched.
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