by ST Branton
The admission was unexpectedly candid—and relatable. It also gave me an idea that I couldn’t believe had eluded me for so long. All of a sudden, I was itching to slip away.
“Sucks to be you!” I made my voice as cheerful as possible. “In my line of work, we don’t have those kinds of restrictions.” While he wasn’t looking at me, I took the opportunity to scan for possible escape routes behind him. From this side of the alley, it was obvious how he’d beat me at my own escape game.
Tables were about to turn, but first, I had to get behind him.
“Your line of work isn’t work,” he said pointedly. “I wish you’d give it up so I didn’t have to come at you like an adversary. We had a good time at that party, didn’t we?”
“That was before I knew about the badge in your pocket.”
“You know, for someone who’s been insisting she’s done nothing wrong, you’re not making a real strong case for innocence, Vic.”
“Well, you’re not making a real strong case for the FBI, Deacon.” Deciding that the best option was just to be bold, I pushed myself up off the fence and strode past him. My shoulder brushed his rock-hard bicep.
“Words hurt.” He reached out but missed my arm.
“Don’t.” I was walking backward now, making him watch me get away. “What do they say in court? Beyond a reasonable doubt? Call me when that’s what you’ve got.”
“Hey.” He moved to come after me, but his radio crackled. That same icy voice cut him off.
“Status report, Deacon. What the hell is taking you so long?”
Deacon’s whole face hardened. He raised the receiver to his lips. “See you in a few, Steph.”
Highly satisfied, I did a showy little pirouette and ran off in a very specific direction.
The next place wasn’t very far away. And it was one I’d seen before.
Are we going where I think we are going?
“Yep.” I muttered, in case Deacon was still within earshot. “Time to try an interrogation of our own.”
CHAPTER SIX
Frank was not where I’d assumed he would be, but for some reason, the guy tending the grimy bar didn’t have any qualms about telling me where he thought Frank might have gone.
“Old rat bastard’s probably at Dickey’s. A few blocks from here. And he still has money on his tab, so feel free to shoot his nuts off when you see him.”
A novel idea, Marcus murmured approvingly.
Not my original plan, but worth considering, depending on Frank’s level of cooperation. I thanked the bartender and made a beeline for Dickey’s. It didn’t take long to see that it was a minor step up from the holes in the wall I was used to. For one thing, the lights in the barroom actually worked. For another, there was no brown haze of smoke oozing out the door—yes, even in our smoke-free city.
Looks like Frank is moving up in the world.
He stood out like a sore thumb, with his extra-wide frame crammed onto a stool at the curve of the L-shaped bar. I would have recognized that slouch and that awful hair from a mile away. He’d been keeping his head down since Rocco’s untimely disappearance, but as soon as I stepped into that place, I knew things hadn’t changed that much for my favorite sleazebag.
Still, he was the one who’d tipped me off about the vampire factory in the first place, so I was inclined to play nice this time.
Or nicer than usual, anyway.
“Gimme a straight bourbon on the rocks.” I signaled the bartender, sliding onto the stool next to Frank. He gave me a bleary glance, then did a double take.
“Aw, hell no. Not you again.”
“What’s the matter, Frank? I thought we were pals.” My fingernails tapped restlessly on the polished surface of the bar. No doubt, he remembered what had happened last time we met. He needed to know it could always go that way again.
“Fuck off, girlie,” he growled. “Everything went to shit, and I got a feeling it’s your fault. Don’t ask me how I know, but you ain’t convincing me otherwise.”
“Oh, please. Tell me more about your stunning intuition.”
He grunted. “All’s I know is, you came in asking where Rocco went and twisting my family jewels into a pretzel.”
Marcus chortled. I am sorry to have missed such a spectacle.
“We talked some, yeah,” I said, remembering it fondly.
“Uh huh.” Frank grasped his glass in one huge paw and took a swig. “And now he’s nowhere to be found. Ain’t gotta tell me that’s no coincidence.”
“I’m impressed by that logic, Frankie. Didn’t know you had it in you.” The barkeep put my drink down in front of me. I picked it up, testing the weight of the glass. It had a nice, heavy base, and I held it as I scooted even closer to Frank. “Now, I’m going to ask you for something, and if you don’t give it to me, I’ll make sure this glass ends up where the sun don’t shine. And you’ll be lucky if it’s still in one piece when it gets there.”
Briefly, his rough skin blanched underneath the rose tint of burgeoning intoxication. Then he smiled, which I didn’t like. My instincts for trouble reared their head.
“Try me,” he said. “You think I didn’t learn my lesson? I ain’t the smartest crayon in the box, but I’m no damn fool, neither. Frank don’t go anywhere alone these days.” The smile widened. A gold-capped tooth gleamed on the side of his mouth. “How about I introduce you to some of my friends. I’m sure they’re just dying to meet ya.”
I shoved away from him and sprang to my feet, abruptly aware of the hush that had fallen over the room. Every other set of eyes in that place was locked on me. Anticipation thickened the air.
“Where the hell did you get an army?” I demanded. None of them were vampires—that much was clear right away—and that meant none of them were too much of a threat.
Poor Frank didn’t know that, but I let him have his moment.
“Outcasts.” He spoke with a tinge of pride. “They didn’t turn us into bloodsuckers, so we’re out of the club, I guess. Thing is, we’re still loyal to our own rules. And I’m connected enough to know that we could make some serious coin bringing your head in on a plate. Ain’t that right, boys?”
A ragged cheer went up from the ragtag crew. Most of them were like Frank, middle-aged, kind of tubby, clad in suits that probably fit ten years ago. I noticed, though, that they all had a fierce gleam in their eyes. There was a lot of anger in these downtrodden men, and it was about to come barreling straight at me.
I groaned. “Don’t make me kill your bros, Frank. It’s too early in the day.”
“You? Ha!” He pounded the bar with a fist. “Lady, you might have tied my balls in a damn fisherman’s knot, but if I had to bet on you or half this shitty bar, I’m putting my money on the bar.”
With that, he signaled his pack.
They were slow, and I was ready. Holding the Gladius Solis’s hilt in one hand and brandishing a barstool in the other, I watched them ooze toward me in a sweaty tide. Some of them rolled up their sleeves as they lumbered, as if that would make a difference. When they got close enough, I chucked the stool into their ranks. It hit the first casualty squarely in the center of the forehead.
He went down like a sack of rocks. The guy right behind him lunged, his fist primed to connect with some part of me. Nonplussed, I grabbed the punch out of the air, twisting his thick wrist to the side. He yelped like a wounded dog.
You are being wasteful, Victoria. Every one of these men has a weakness that you are failing to exploit to its fullest potential.
“It’s a bar fight, not an art installation.” I struck a guy three times my size in his almost-nonexistent throat. He croaked, clutching at his Adam’s apple. “You can put the critiques away.”
Not if I want to make you into a halfway respectable warrior.
“I thought that was your deal.” Someone grabbed me from behind with thick, muscled arms. I hooked my hands around his elbows and bent forward hard at the waist, tossing his considerable bulk into another adva
ncing wave. They scattered like howling bowling pins.
Not long after that, the scene devolved into fat, flailing dominoes among a drunken herd of wildebeests. A bottle came sailing out of nowhere and struck me square on the head, showering me with little bits of glittery shrapnel.
“Son of a bitch!” I shouted, more out of annoyance than anything else. I could feel a thin trickle of blood along my temple, but the pain that should have gone with it was nowhere to be found.
Good, Marcus observed. You have become sufficiently durable. The strength of Carcerum is with you from the nectar.
I was pissed about the bottle, but damn if he wasn’t right. A veritable hailstorm of flying appendages, and all I had to do was fend off the occasional fist or foot that made it close enough to my person. One more unlucky scumbag got heaved back into his comrades, under whom he promptly disappeared.
I wasn’t planning on killing any of these idiots. They didn’t really deserve it, and they weren’t worth the effort. But I wasn’t about to be gentle, either, and if they happened to get hurt in the process of trying to kill me? That was just collateral damage.
I pretended the bladeless hilt in my hand was a pistol and set to whipping, working my arm with the rhythm of a machine. Even the ones who were already down got conked in the side of the head. This little chat was between Frank and me. No witnesses.
Frank, for his part, stayed put on his stool as the drama unfolded around him, staring wide-eyed as his forces were demolished. He was shaking when I finished off his crew and returned to him, the beer glass dripping foam and ale onto the wood. The bartender was nowhere to be seen.
“What the hell?” he sputtered.
I shrugged. “Your help blows chunks, asshole. Maybe there’s a reason you didn’t get to play with the big boys in the first place.”
Frank’s chins quivered. “That was low.”
The bourbon glass was back in my hand. “So, let me repeat myself. If you don’t tell me what I want to know, you’re gonna be shitting bourbon for a week.” The sword hilt twirled lazily in my other hand. He eyed it from the corner of his vision. Beads of sweat stood out on the wide plane of his forehead.
He was still one hundred percent the Frank I knew—a big, lunkhead coward. Part of me loved him for it.
“This is bullshit,” he said. “What the hell do you think I can tell you? Didn’t you hear a thing I said? We’re out. Finished. Cut off. Those dogshit vampires don’t want nothing to do with us.”
Interesting. I was unaware that survivors were permitted to exist outside of Delano or Lorcan’s control. This could mean that there are other loopholes. These potential lapses in security must be duly punished.
I agreed, and I wanted Frank to get to the good stuff already. He was too busy moping into his drink to see me coming. I put the end of the sword hilt into his sternum and shoved. A thick wheeze squeezed itself from his chest, and in the next instant, he was sprawled on the ground.
“Dammit, why do you always gotta do this?” he spat, struggling to maintain his breath. “Do I look young to you? I can’t live like this.”
Gravity sank the hilt farther into his generous torso. He squirmed. I could tell he thought something extremely unpleasant was going to befall him at any moment. Little did he know, I couldn’t do that to him. Frank was simply too much fun.
Time continues to flow, Victoria. Do not spend too much of it toying with hapless underlings.
He was right. I lifted the butt of the now-bladeless sword a little so that Frank had room to get a full breath in. The guy gulped the air like a drowning man.
“Now you’re just being dramatic,” I said.
He narrowed his baggy eyes at me. “You’re a real card, you know that, honey? Look, all right.” Grasping for the nearest stool, he used the leg to haul himself halfway to a sitting position. A few truly disgusting coughs rocked his torso. “Just lemme paddle back across the damn River Styx.”
I poked the hilt into his belly and rolled my eyes. “Some of us don’t have all day, Frank. You gonna talk, or do you want this up your ass? Cause I’m happy to oblige.” The ice jangled against the walls of the glass. An expression of vague sickness crossed Frank’s countenance.
“Jeezum Crow. Well, you’re not going to believe me, but the mob’s dead, sweet cheeks. At least, as far as I’m concerned. Some freaky shit went down a few weeks back, and everybody scattered to the damned winds. Like I said, I didn’t take a deal with the devil, so I’m out of the loop. And you know what? That’s fine by me. Means I don’t need to risk my ass for these dickheads who don’t give a shit about me.”
His flabby face was redder than ever. After he stopped talking, he pounded the left side of his chest, and I wondered if his heart was about to burst. “Tell me what you heard, then. The rumor mill must be alive and well.”
Frank grimaced. “Not the way it was before the vamps crashed the party. Only thing I know for sure is that there’s a big job out west, and that’s because it was set in motion before Rocco’s plans went tits up. They never shared the details with us grunts, so I don’t know them. Okay? That’s it.”
“Where out west?” I prodded him with the sword.
“Hell if I know. Somewhere in Cali is what I heard. Lot of guys been going out that way and never coming back, if you get my drift. Seems like they had the right idea.”
If they are still alive, that is.
My thoughts exactly. “And you’re absolutely sure you don’t know specifics about this ‘big job,’ Frank? Because I have ways of finding stuff out, and if this all comes back to you in the end, you can bet you’ll be seeing me again.”
He gave me a bitter look. “Were your parents pitbulls, kid? I told you all of it. Maybe this time, you’ll leave me alone for a whole month.”
“If you’re lucky.” But before I left, I helped Frank to his feet, pulling on one corpulent arm until he stood unsteadily with his hands on the counter. “Here. This drink’s on me.” I left the glass in front of him.
He muttered something indistinct as I left. “Did you hear what he said?” I asked Marcus.
I believe it was, ‘Thanks.’
I smiled. “See, he’s learning some manners. I’m already making life better down here.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
The next morning, I paced through my training with a million other thoughts zooming around my brain. The dissolution of the mob meant that Frank hadn’t been quite as rich a resource as I’d hoped. There were still vast gaps in my understanding of what was going on behind the scenes, but if this mystery job out west was big enough to move bodies three thousand miles, then it was definitely something to look into.
But where could I dig up more information? I hated the feeling of flying blind and flying mostly blind wasn’t much better.
“What do you think, Marcus?” I asked. “We’ve seen Deacon, and we just saw Frank. Jules needs to stay all the way in the dark, so that means I’m out of people. You’re up.”
During my service to Kronin, he would frequently send me to deal with rogue Forgotten elements. Oftentimes I was sent in relatively blind.
“So what did you do?”
It was simple, really. Just search out the bizarre, the strange, the out of place. The Forgotten have a way of disrupting the natural order of things. The gods leave their fingerprints on everything.
“Well the tabloids have turned up squat, and we don’t exactly have an eyes on view of the world here in my shitty apartment.” I thought for a second, then the answer hit me like a metric ton of bricks. “Marcus, I know exactly where we need to look. The greatest compendium of the bizarre the world has ever known.”
What is it? An oracle of some kind? An academy of the philosophers?
“Even better. It’s called the internet.”
This net, it will help us find what we need?
“Trust me—if you were impressed by the newspaper, the internet is going to blow your medallion-trapped mind. But I don’t exactly have a computer on
hand. We’ll have to head down to the library.”
There were truly astonishing libraries in my lifetime, Marcus remarked, almost dreamily. They contained tomes of knowledge in multitudes, stacked higher than a man could climb. Given sufficient time, one could obtain all the secrets of the world and beyond, if he so desired.
“Right, right. We totally still have that.” I had neither the heart nor the patience to attempt to explain the slow, inexorable advance of digitization. He’d see it for himself when we got there.
I sped up my sword strikes, channeling all my replenished energy into the downstrokes. The actual hilt was my weapon this session; the training swords had begun to look more like oversized toothpicks. It was a weird exercise of will to keep my mind from summoning the golden blade. There was little doubt that it could easily start a fire in the loft or cleave through the floor.
But soon, I wasn’t even thinking about the blade anymore. “We’ll head to the library,” I announced. “As soon as I’m done with this.”
How is that possible? Those locations must be ancient in this time.
“No, no. These ones are modern, but the concept is the same. You’ll see.”
Finishing my routine in a hurry, I put the sword aside, grabbed my bar of soap, and took a shower by dumping a bucket of lukewarm water over my head as I stood in the middle of the non-functional tub. The suds threatened to run down into my eyes as I scrubbed my scalp clean and wished for the umpteenth time that the meager plumbing in my loft extended to a proper shower.
Not that I wasn’t grateful for a working toilet—I was, immensely. But a true hot shower was one of the comforts I missed the most. It was moments like that one, me standing behind a wall of cardboard and washing my hair out of a bucket, that I realized with the most clarity how abnormal everything had become.
And maybe, just fleetingly, I let myself get close to wanting normalcy again.