It’s going to be a long night.
His jacket makes a bag for it all. I’m wondering if I have time to visit his hotel room right now, see what else I can learn from that, when I hear footsteps up the alley. Quick as thought, I toss the jacket-bag full of Macy’s possessions over the cemetery wall. Then I dart across the alley to a dumpster, lift the lid a foot, and let it fall with a clang. Then I look up the alley toward the footsteps.
It’s Nick.
My heart stops.
He’s not smiling.
I want to throw up.
I wipe my palms on the seat of my jeans. My heart is thumping a million beats a minute. “What?” I know I sound guilty. Thank goodness I got rid of Macy’s effects before Nick turned up.
Nick looks like thunder. “We have to go somewhere. Now.”
Did he see anything? How did he find me? Maybe he planted a GPS tracer on me. This overprotective thing is going to be inconvenient if we are to spend much more time together.
Then I see his cop face. This isn’t Nick being protective. This is Nick busting me.
All I can do is pray and hope that he got here too late to catch any of that. Especially the part where Macy trickled out of his clothes into a pile of dust.
I can’t say a word. I stare into Nick’s face, feeling pathetic and helpless and horribly guilty, and he takes me by the elbow and marches me back to the lighted street.
He must think he knows something. He’s mad. He’s not talking. He’s being Federal. He hates me, and the thought makes me want to throw myself under a bus.
The vampire in me is saying, Kill him.
Deep breath. With some difficulty I suppress the urge to solve this the quick way.
He’s not shooting me or trying to stake me with a crucifix or anything like that, so he can’t have seen.
So I have to play dumb, act innocent, be as grouchy as usual if I can find the courage for that, and hope to finesse whatever is coming.
Chapter Twenty-One
Nick marches me to his double-parked Cherokee and practically tosses me inside. I can’t speak. I’m too busy wrestling with the urge to break him in half and get out of there. Plus down inside somewhere I’m howling like a baby. It’s a dreadful thing to think you’re a monster all your life, and then find out you’re not, just when a little monster would come in handy.
I’m crying. Big fat tears pour down my face.
Nick snarls, “Stop that.”
I try to gulp air and hiccup instead. “I can’t.”
“Just knock it off!” He sends the car squealing west on Montrose Avenue. His voice is hard, and his energy is a churning mess of fear and disgust and fury.
So he saw me after all. I remember punching Macy until he cried, and the thought that Nick might have been watching the whole time stretches my mouth out of control. My chest tightens. My breath starts coming in whining gasps. “You’re being so me-e-e-a-n!”
“Just stop it!” he grates. I think my tears are upsetting him. But he’s seen too much.
I taste his energy. He’s full of revulsion. There’s even a faint smell of vomit in his throat.
I want to die.
I should be thinking fast. Instead I’m torn between blubbering and killing him.
Nick pulls out his phone.
Soon I hear the voice of the man he calls Boss. “Yes?”
“Bringing you my co-conspirator.”
“The girl?” I hear fresh interest in that warm, smooth, creepy voice. “Really. Why?”
“Deposition,” Nick says briefly, and my brain starts working.
He isn’t telling his boss what he’s seen. That means maybe he didn’t see much.
Or else he isn’t sure what he saw.
Or, ew, he’s fully aware of what I am, and aware that I can kill him where he sits without moving a muscle, and aware that I’m going to stick to denial to try to bluff my way through this, and aware that therefore I probably won’t kill him here and now, so he’s not going to accuse me to his boss while I’m listening because that might provoke me into killing him right now.
The thing is, I’m not sure I can kill him. Not by taking his prana, anyway. Every time I’ve tried to take him down a peg, energywise, it’s only made him horny.
Just now, the thought of sex makes me gag.
I think it’s making Nick feel sick, too. Nick, who loved me less than two hours ago.
I must not be much of a monster, I think, taking too big a breath again and hiccuping. A really seasoned monster would just shrug off her first great sex with a guy and, oh, punch him in the head and kick her way through the windshield and turn into a mist and fly away. Let him try to explain all the women’s clothes in his car, once he’s sorted out all the collisions and traded insurance cards and oh, no, he’d probably have a head-on collision with somebody and be killed.
I can’t do it.
“Interesting,” says Nick’s boss over the phone, while I am thinking all this. Maybe I’m thinking fast after all. “I’ll have the grandmother secured.”
My body turns to ice. I stop crying.
“Who with?” Nick says bluntly. “I just saw her kill a guy. Somebody you know, maybe? Short, forty, balding, hundred-and-seventy-five pounds. You didn’t tell me you had backup behind me,” he adds in a neutral tone, but I can feel his annoyance and confusion. His energy fills the car.
“Very well,” his boss says without a pause. “Deliver the girl and then secure the grandmother.”
I hear Nick grind his teeth. “Arriving five.” He hangs up.
The wailing baby inside me has sunk far down under a lake of frozen calm.
Let Nick bring me to this boss guy, who is apparently also Sageman. That’s good news. I only have to kill Sageman. Then get rid of that evidence. Then get back to Jilly as fast as I can and deal with Nick somehow.
Thank God these Feds are on a tight budget. I won’t have to pull off one of those James Bond scenes, with dozens of thugs in blue nylon jackets throwing themselves at me one at a time for a twenty-minute fight scene at the evil installation while the bomb ticks down the clock.
Nick turns the Cherokee north up Lincoln Avenue. His face looks harder as the orange street lights flash over it. His energy is a mess.
I can’t fix this. Why didn’t I ask for mind-control powers when I was designing my vampire-self?
I try to assess the damage.
Nick didn’t hesitate to turn me in. He now knows he wasn’t in love with me. It was just lust, and magic-lust at that, which literally made him want to vomit just now. He probably feels extra-sick, knowing he’s got a boner because he’s sitting next to a magical murderer.
Kill me, somebody. Now. Please.
That option sounds pretty good.
The black depression I’ve been fighting begins to swell, then shrink unpleasantly, bigger and smaller, like a balloon swelling and shrinking in my chest.
Then I think about the man I’m about to meet, creepy-voice-guy, who scares Nick, who wants the coin, who sent Nick to send me after Dr. Katterfelto.
There’s three things I never want to see in one place. The coin, the mad scientist, and Nick’s boss.
Nick won’t stop him. Nick works for him.
So I guess I have to.
The hard, cold, spiky ball of fear that’s been bouncing from my tummy up into my throat begins to settle.
Okay. I have a mission. My life may be over, but I have something to do first.
We pull into the parking lot of a crappy motel on Lincoln Avenue, and Nick drives to a unit way on the end.
I take a deep breath.
Here comes round two.
Chapter Twenty-Two
As Nick pulls into the parking space in front of the last unit, he turns to look at me again. His glare scorches me. His energy has shifted since he dragged me out of that alley into the car. He’s still scared, and his will is like iron.
Underneath all that is a bone-deep revulsion.
I disgust him.<
br />
I wait for him to come around to my side and open my door. I stand up and walk to the motel room. Not since I was sixteen and walked into operating room prep to have my tonsils out have I been this scared.
A man is sitting in a chair by the window when we come in. He stands. Macy was right, he’s very tall, and he’s old, but not more than sixty. He has that faintly prune-like look you see in retired tennis players, as if they’ve been left out in the sun to shrivel. There’s nothing feeble in his eyes.
“Ah!” he says.
Nick nods at him. Nick’s pulse has shot up. I can hear it thumping in his ears. Holy poop, Nick, what have you let me in for?
“Ms. Nagazy,” Sageman says. He nods at the bed. “You may sit down.” Then he looks at Nick. “Report.”
Nick says abruptly, “I followed her from her apartment. She went to a coffee shop, then she got on a bus, then she got off the bus and went into an alley behind a cemetery, under the El tracks. A man got off the bus and followed her. I followed them. It was pretty dark, but I had the infrared goggles.” Nick swallows. He is not looking at me. “She jumped straight up, a standing jump of maybe twenty feet, clear out of sight, into the El understructure. I couldn’t see where she’d gone. Then the man following her got to where she disappeared. She — she fell on him.”
Sageman doesn’t say anything. His face doesn’t show anything at all, but his pulse is kicking up. He smells like Old Spice and expensive shoes. He has the perfect spy face, noncommittal, completely ordinary, while being at the same time terrifying. If I had to describe him, I wouldn’t know what to say. Tall. Thin. Old.
And excited. Although not, I am relieved to note, sexually. On second thoughts, I don’t know if this is a good thing.
“Proceed,” says Sageman.
“She punched the guy a few times. He didn’t fight or get up. I couldn’t get close enough to hear them talking.”
Nick’s voice is a little reproachful here. If Sageman has any fancy spook gear, he hasn’t given it to Nick. I suppress an urge to point this out.
“After about five minutes she turned him over on his back. I think he was alive at that point. And then she — she laid her hand on his chest.”
He stops, and I can see Nick struggling for words. “And he just kind of collapsed. I watched for a minute. She was folding clothes or something. That’s when I took off down the alley toward her. By the time I got there, there was no sign of the body, and she had dumped the clothes in a dumpster.”
Hah, I think, I’m that far ahead of you. Much good it’ll do me, I reflect, looking at Sageman.
Sageman looks at me and looks back at Nick. “Any confessions en route?”
“No sir. She knows she’s in trouble.” Nick glares at me.
I’m starting to think again. Weirdly, being in Sageman’s presence, which gives off a major vibe of cold stinking evil, has cleared my head. My tears have long dried on my face. I feel as ready for action as I know how.
Sageman is looking me over with approval. “Well,” he says in a silky voice.
God, he’s creepy. He sounds so uncle-ish, so trustworthy. I wouldn’t let him valet my car. I can hear his heart start to beat faster.
“Time for you to secure the grandmother,” he says to Nick, without looking away from me.
I’ve been ready for him to threaten Jilly, so I don’t flinch or snarl, but I can feel myself flushing hot. I want to kill this guy.
Sageman nods again, as if in response to my red face. “As I suspected. A civilized vampire. Is the grandmother one, do you suppose?” he says, and I hate him with every cell in my body. “Mm, no, I don’t think so. This will be a polite conversation.” He looks at Nick now. “You may go,” he says sharply.
Nick leaves without a word.
Sageman turns back to me as the door shuts behind Nick. And I realize what he has known all along. I can’t kill him. He knows where Jilly is. He knows I will do what I have to, to protect her. Which in this case means letting him do whatever he wants to do to me.
o0o
“Ms. Nagazy, you must have been turned very young,” Sageman says. I want to kill him, kill now, kill fast. But Nick hates me enough. “I can see where Mr. Jones might have miscalculated.”
I wait. I will wait him out if it takes a year.
After a long silence he says, “I’ve been looking for you. Two years ago you killed a man in my employ. His job was to find a woman who had been followed, some weeks before, by another of my operatives. An operative who disappeared. This time, however, my man was wearing a tracer. I was able to recover his shoe.”
Shoe, I think. Oops.
“Inside the shoe the lab found traces of a fine dust which proved to be something like ash — the ash that remains when a mammalian body is burned. If it hadn’t been for the tracer, there would have been no way of identifying the victim at all.”
That’s something I didn’t know, although it’s not much use to me.
He looks me over. “I want to meet someone like you. Can you imagine why?”
I sit stony-faced. I will not kill this guy.
“In my position, I learn an enormous amount of information about the terrible changes that have been poisoning the world. I meet many people who claim to have magical powers. But the ones I want to meet are the hardest to find.” He smiles. “The ones who actually possess magical powers.”
His teeth are as perfect as dentures, but they’re real teeth. This guy comes from money, old money, the kind that’s had good prenatal nutrition and good dentistry for four generations. An aristocrat.
“When I learn of someone like you, I find you. Because once upon a time, Ms. Nagazy, you — and every other person like you — were a normal individual.”
He leans forward in his chair. My skin crawls. “And then something happened. Something granted you these extraordinary powers.”
I lean away from him. His energy whiffs like every mean drunk who ever decided that I would be easy to roll. He smells of bad intentions.
I decide to try a question. “Why didn’t you send your army after me, if you’re the government? Instead of one guy, two guys? That’s lame.”
“I wanted to find you first, my dear.”
“Bull. When somebody like you wants something, you throw everything you have at it.” I think about Macy, a second-rate creep, and I think about Nick. Then I get it.
Oh. He’s using Nick’s hard-on for magic.
My eyes narrow, then widen. “You’re using Nick.”
His pupils change. That is, I swear, the only movement in his face. His energy does a little skip, like a spooked rabbit.
“It’s because Nick’s not normal, isn’t it? He sniffs out the magic for you.” I want to stand up and scream at him. Instead I settle back, pretending to relax. “You found him early on. And now you use him to find people.”
A ripple of surprise and fear rushes over him. I’m right. Like a fool, I push harder. “What happens to those people after he finds them?”
“We talk,” Sageman says.
“Your little friend Macy Rowlands planted bugs and cameras in my apartment. He told me he was supposed to kidnap me. Was he also supposed to get rid of me when you’d got what you wanted?”
“I think you’re a special case, don’t you?” Sageman says gently.
Uh-huh. I’m the immortal coward with the death wish, a short temper, and so-so impulse control.
It never even occurred to me before to wonder if Nick’s employers might know how he would affect me, or how he would seem to be immune to my prana-sucking power. The sheer volume of questions I should have been asking myself makes me feel stupid. I slump.
The bed under me is uncomfortably lumpy. Something is sticking me in the ass, under the cheap polyester motel coverlet.
Sageman notices me noticing this. He smiles. “There’s a crucifix under the bedspread. And a few other items. I wasn’t sure what would be needed. One thinks ahead in this business. I think you will find you cannot m
ove from the bed.”
I have an idea where this is going now.
He takes a long, slow, measured breath. Under all that calm, though, his energy is spiking. Here it comes.
“I want you to turn me, Ms. Nagazy.”
He sits back and looks at me as if he’s just laid four aces on the table.
“Make me like yourself. In return I offer no arrest, no paperwork. No record of our meeting. Indeed, I can arrange for all records about you to be expunged from government files. You could become one of my operatives.”
My nostrils flare in disgust.
He adds, “Or not. But you will turn me. I will see to it you are not on the radar. And, of course, your grandmother will get every care, without regard to expense.”
The mutt. Does he think I don’t remember that he sent Nick to hold Jilly hostage?
“You won’t take care of her,” I scoff. “You’re a killer, not a keeper.”
Sageman makes a fastidious face. “I don’t kill. I have people who do that for me.”
I wonder if Macy was one of them.
“Yes, he is. Was? You’ve killed him, then.”
I pounce. “But Agent Jones doesn’t kill people, does he? You may have to get your hands dirty after all.”
“Jones will do what he’s told,” Sageman says a little too lightly.
That’s a lie, too.
Aloud, I say, “You don’t have a grip on him the way you did on Macy.” Certainty flares in me. “That’s because Nick is a decent human being and you’re an evil bastard and Macy was a killer. Who else have you got out there, waiting to mess up the innocent?”
“I never mess up the innocent,” Sageman purrs. He’s getting angrier and angrier. “That’s how I succeed where others fail. Now, what about it? Anonymity. And your grandmother’s health and, I’m sure, her considerable hospital bills completely cared for. I call that a very nice offer.”
I’d like to tell him that his energy tastes of gas ovens and cigar bombs. I’d like to kill him where he sits. From here, I could do it within seconds.
A Taste of You Page 14