“You’ve chosen Ellis,” she said, leaning on the Viper’s low-slung roof with both forearms and smiling at me in a way that made me feel weak and wanton and imagine all kinds of wicked things. Voshki shrugged. “I respect that. If you change your mind and want me, I’ll be happy. But if you don’t, I’m not going to interfere with your and Ellis’s relationship.”
I stared at her for a moment. “Bullshit. You’re gonna interfere in every damn way you can think of,” I said.
She laughed. “Maybe. But it’s all you’re gonna get from me for now, Dante. Take it or leave it.”
I decided to take it. What the hell. A bellhop rushed out of the hotel and took Voshki’s luggage from the Viper to carry it to her room. He practically simpered over both the car and Voshki, and from the way Voshki encouraged his simpering, I wondered briefly if she had ever been into men at some point in her nearly nine hundred-year existence. That long, you’re going to start thinking about experimenting at least.
Inside, Samson, Ellis and Amelia all were waiting for us in the hotel bar where the proprietor had kindly, but pointlessly, furnished them with coffee and a Continental-style breakfast. They were drinking the coffee but, predictably, the food was untouched. As we entered Ellis’s gaze met mine and I felt her reach into my head, looking for any hint that Voshki and I might have indulged in a spot of wildly abandoned sex on the way here. That my promise had not been enough for her annoyed me, and deliberately I thought sexy thoughts about Voshki to give Ellis the wrong impression. Or I did until Voshki gave me such an odd look that I feared my fantasies were so strong even she might be picking up on them, the spirit if not the letter anyway.
Voshki greeted Amelia with a sisterly warmth touchingly human and, I think, quite genuine. I suppose there is no reason why vampires should not feel familial attachments every bit as strongly as we humans do. I mean, Milton and his wife are pretty cozy. When they had done hugging and catching up, Voshki slipped back into leader mode and we got down to the serious business of why we were here.
“So, we know the Children of Judas are here.” Voshki draped herself cat-like all over a wicker chair and I tried not to stare. Thinking those sexy thoughts about her had kind of got me started. Damn it. I was being fed to the lions later, perhaps more literally than I wanted to imagine, and the very vampire who had volunteered me as dish du jour was making me all hot and bothered. I let my gaze wander until it came to Ellis, who offered me a quick little smile. That did not do much to stop the sexy thoughts.
“We also know that the sheriff is probably under their influence, agreed?” Voshki asked.
The heads of the other vampires nodded. I didn’t feel the need to nod, or do anything much except await my fate. Voshki tapped long fingers on the arm of her chair, a faint frown on her face.
“I think our best course of action is to allow Dante to have dinner with this sheriff tonight as planned and see what happens,” she pronounced. This time only Samson and Amelia nodded. Ellis just stared at a spot somewhere to the left of Voshki’s head, her face impassive except for a tiny, tight tic at the corner of her mouth. Voshki glanced at me. “You’ll be protected at all times, Dante. All we need from you is to know whether the sheriff really is under the control of the Children and whether she knows anything of their intentions.”
I frowned. “How am I supposed to find any of that out? I can’t exactly come right out and ask her, if she doesn’t even know she’s being controlled.” It was a reasonable flaw in Voshki’s plan, I thought.
Apparently Voshki didn’t see it that way. She flapped a hand to indicate that this was a detail, a mere trifle. And something I should not therefore concern myself with. Too bad. I was concerned. I was very fucking concerned. “If she has an agenda being controlled by the Children, you can be sure it will come out,” Voshki explained grimly.
I felt my eyebrows go leaping up into my hairline. “How so?”
“She may bring the subject of vampires up, try to press you on your thoughts about it. Or she may even introduce you to one of their number…under the guise of introducing you to a human, of course.”
At once I thought again of the blood-red hair of Mrs. Mayor of Holly Bush Junction, the uber-WASP Marjorie Tucker. Could she be a Child of Judas after all? It would be an excellent position to have a vampire in, wife of the mayor…and did that mean her husband, Hizzoner, was also a vampire? If so, then Holly Bush Junction was a veritable cozy little nest of bad bloodsuckers.
Whilst I was woolgathering Voshki moved on to deliver the news that the Council were of a mind with her that the Children of Judas were planning an overthrow of Voshki’s leadership. The Council, it seemed, were not unduly concerned about this ever coming to fruition.
“Why not?” I could not help myself but ask.
Voshki gave me a long, level look that was replicated on the faces of the other three vampires. I was not quite certain what I ought to make of those looks and so I figured on not over-thinking it. Voshki said, “The Children of Judas know only one thing well…violence and death.”
“That’s two things,” I pointed out.
Voshki took a breath, let one eyebrow twitch. “One and the same thing to the Children of Judas,” she clarified. I swallowed. Suddenly I wished the obliging proprietor would open up the bar. Voshki gave a shrug. “They do not know how to organize at a level that would be necessary for a leadership takeover. Some member of their merry band of mayhem-makers has got an idea above his or her station and is riding it out. It won’t last long. We shall see to it.”
I was definitely not going to over-think that one either. I swung a look in Amelia’s direction. “How is Caitlin holding up after her ordeal?” I inquired, making sure to get plenty of sarcastic spin on the last word. Amelia grinned.
“Oh, she’s fine. Loving all the attention and the sympathy.”
I wondered how much attention and sympathy Deb, the wardrobe assistant, was getting out of it. Probably not much at all. None from Caitlin, that would be for sure. To Caitlin, the presence on this earth of Deb would already have been as forgotten as last year’s fashions. That reminded me of something else that had been bothering me. I turned to Voshki again. “Back in LA, you said you thought the Children of Judas were attempting to discredit you…by killing humans in your employ, right?”
Voshki nodded. I frowned at her. “Well, doesn’t that show a certain degree of planning on their part?”
Voshki returned my frown with interest. “Your point?” she demanded.
“Well, it does kind of contradict your claim just now that they only know how to do violence and death.”
Pointing out another flaw in her thinking did not endear me to the beleaguered vampire leader right at that moment. I think I might have been in rather more serious trouble had Ellis not been present. All the same, I was disturbed by the hard stare Voshki gave me.
Surprisingly, it was Amelia who came to my rescue by insisting that I had a point. I gave her a look caught between surprise and gratitude and she gave me a little wink in response. I could get to like Amelia Kevorkian, I decided.
Voshki thought it over and decided that yes, I did have a point, which was a relief for me. I didn’t like to think of Voshki carrying a grudge against me, however small or unimportant it might be. She steepled her fingers over her chest. Steepling can be so very pretentious on a lot of people, but it suits Voshki. “So whoever is organizing the Children is capable of planning,” she conceded. She shook her head. “It still does not mean that whatever they are planning will succeed. Far from it. But…we should probably not underestimate this person.”
“I’ll take Samson with me tonight,” Ellis put in.
Voshki looked at her for a long moment. Then she nodded.
I wish I could say the hours between arriving back in Holly Bush Junction with Voshki and my dinner date with the sheriff dragged on, but they did not. I spent the time in the local library with Ellis and Voshki, all three of us going through old editions of the town
newspaper to see how many red-haired residents we could spot. It felt like busy-work to me, although Voshki assured me it was the least obtrusive way of finding out whether or not the town was a Children of Judas stronghold.
Busy-work. I don’t care what else she said it was.
The Holly Bush Junction Public Library was as old-fashioned as the rest of the town and kept its newspaper copies in paper files in the basement. The air in the basement smelled of mustiness and mouse turds. We didn’t find very much in the way of suspected vampires either. If anything, Holly Bush Junction seemed to have had a dearth of redheads before the arrival of Mr. and Mrs. Hizzoner. Of course, only the editions from the late 1990s onwards had color photos. Before that it was all monochrome, so we might reasonably have missed a few. There were plenty of full-color photos in the more recent editions of the Tuckers, and Mr. was as ginger as Mrs.
“He has to be a Child of Judas, right?” I remarked and Voshki nodded. I squinted a closer look at the man in the photos with Marjorie Tucker. Tall, broad about the chest and shoulders, looked like he might have played college football many years ago but had let some of the muscle run to fat. Otherwise, James Aaron Tucker had the kind of nondescript looks you just could not hold in your memory. There was simply nothing to grab hold of.
I asked: “Do you think the Tuckers could be the ones leading the Children of Judas?”
Voshki first glanced at Ellis, then shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s possible.” She gave me a dazzling smile of the kind could have made nuns and priests throw away their habits and pick up some other, less spiritual habits. “Hopefully, Dante, you’ll be able to find that out tonight.”
Yes. Hopefully I could find that out in between avoiding being eaten by psychotic vampires, killed by anyone or anything else that might be undesirable to me.
* * *
The sheriff came to the hotel and picked me up at seven on the dot. I had chosen to wear a black suit and a plain white shirt, open at the neck. I considered a tie, but decided it looked too formal—and besides, I wasn’t sure how Lois Bartlett would feel about dining out with a woman in a tie, in her hometown. I succeeded in taming the worst excesses of my hair, not that I reckoned the taming would stick for very long. It just has a mind of its own. A perverse one.
I have got to say the sheriff scrubbed up pretty damn well, too, in a dark blue pants suit with a low-cut pale pink top underneath, wearing heels that took her over six feet and made me glad I was not the kind of person to be intimidated by a woman being taller than me. Neither apparently was she bothered by my being a good deal shorter than her. She arrived not on a motorcycle, as I had half-expected and maybe hoped she would, but in a late-model Chevy Impala that looked as though it had been very recently taken for a spin through the car wash.
“Hey,” she said when I came down to the reception to meet her. I did not want her coming up to the room I was still sharing with Ellis and getting the wrong idea. Well, the right idea. Hell, any ideas at all. She smiled broadly and I saw her Norwegian-blue eyes give me a quick once-over. I was doing the same to her. Except I might have gone over her figure three or four times.
“You look really good,” I told her. It’s not that I am not generous with compliments or that I get tongue-tied around good-looking women, it was more that I kept thinking about this particular good-looking woman playing an unwitting Renfield to a bunch of murderous vampires bent on toppling the leadership of Voshki Kevorkian and that kind of unnerved me. My powers of charm wane a little when I am unnerved.
Thankfully Lois Bartlett did not seem to notice. “I could say the same about you and I will,” she responded.
With this dizzying complimenting out of the way we adjourned to the restaurant where she had booked us a table. The journey was short, sparing me the strain of making small talk whilst wondering if Ellis and Samson were following and whether the sheriff would notice we were being followed… She was a law enforcement professional, after all—weren’t they trained to notice things like that? I was getting lost in these uneasy thoughts when Lois pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant and announced that we were there. “There” was a quiet little steak house restaurant, so crammed with wood paneling and stone flagging that it could have been an English country pub that became lost in the wrong century and on the wrong continent. The carpets, seat upholstery and curtains were all heavy red and gold brocade, and the lighting was provided by a multitude of wall sconces which looked at first to be real candles but on second glance turned out to be electric imitations. A waiter in proper livery showed us to our table and presented us with laminated menus done in the same red and gold as the fittings.
“Would the ladies care for a refreshment whilst they decide?” he inquired.
This lady did indeed care for a refreshment. I even briefly considered asking the obliging waiter to bring me a bottle of whatever was the strongest liquor they kept in stock, but I settled on asking for a beer instead. Safer to stay in control of my faculties, no matter how nerve-wracked those faculties might be. Lois Bartlett asked for a glass of white wine, whatever was the house wine. When the waiter departed to fetch our drinks, she smiled across the table at me.
“I thought I was going to get stood up tonight,” she said. Her tone was playful but her blue eyes were curious. “You and Miss Kovacs left the hotel in a bit of a rush.”
I smiled. “Urgent business back in Hollyweird,” I told her. I shrugged like it was something that happened every day in my crazy life and I was so used to dealing with it I was practically bored to tears by it. Actually that wasn’t so far from the truth. Sadly.
“Ah…” The curiosity was still in her eyes… “You’re an agent, of course. Did you get it worked out?”
I nodded. Did not elaborate. “How was your day?” I asked instead.
She took the hint, shrugging in response. “The life of a small town sheriff isn’t terribly exciting. A parking violation is a big deal. Nothing like Hollyweird, I’m afraid.”
“Oh, you should never be afraid of that,” I assured her and she smiled. I asked if she had lived in Holly Bush Junction long? It seemed a natural thing to do. She made a seesaw motion with her hand.
“About four years,” she said. “My dad was a small town sheriff and I kind of liked the idea.”
“Ah. Family of cops?”
“Me, my brother, our dad. My brother is a cop in San Diego. What about you, Dante? You a Hollywood brat?”
I nodded. “Born and bred. For my sins.”
She tilted a look at me that was part amusement, part curiosity again. “You don’t seem the typical Hollywood sort. You’re…fairly normal.”
The waiter returned bearing our drinks. We took them, Lois Bartlett pronounced her wine just fine, and the waiter left again, beaming, and with assurances that we should order whenever we were ready, that everything on the menu tonight was quite, quite special. That made me wonder if Lois Bartlett herself would be on the menu for me tonight? It had occurred to me this might not even be a trap, it might be simply a dinner date. The vampires could be paranoid. It was a nice fantasy anyway—that anything in my life at this point could be unrelated to the vampires.
I smiled at her. “I’ll take ‘normal’ as a compliment. But you wouldn’t think it if you knew my parents.”
“They are Hollywood sorts then?”
“Let’s say my mother has her own room at Betty Ford and leave it at that.”
We both ordered steaks. I know most of Hollywood is supposed to either be vegan or fruitarian or on some other weird macrobiotic or seaweed-and-sawdust-only diet, but I don’t have any truck with that New Age eating nonsense. I like real food. And if some of it wants to clog my arteries, then so be it. What’s the point of being able to afford the best medical care if you’re not going to use it? Whilst Lois and I ate we chatted. The usual small talk you do on a first date with a normal human being. You talk about your work, your family, your friends, what you do on your days off work, what kind of music/movie
s/books you like. Nary a word about vampires was mentioned. Lois did not bring up the incident with Caitlin Harris or the peeper either, and I felt disinclined to steer the conversation in any such direction. Hell, I was enjoying myself. I almost managed to forget that the entire evening could be the prelude to springing a trap. I just began to like being with a good-looking, apparently intelligent woman who was unlikely to have a vial of white powder stashed in her purse or to have a meltdown two weeks into our relationship, and who was not going to want to drink my blood after sex either. Although the latter thought was both ungenerous of me and two-faced, since I hadn’t exactly protested at Ellis’s blood-drinking.
Speaking of Ellis, she did not even once intrude upon my thoughts, which I suppose was thoughtful of her. She was watching out for me whilst giving me personal space. Perhaps trying to prove that vampires really were not crazy-jealous. Yeah. Right. I so wasn’t buying it. Ellis would be going out of her freaking mind with the effort of not spying on me.
Maybe if I had stayed on point, if I hadn’t allowed myself to be lulled by the cozy notion that this really was just a normal date, maybe then I might have had some inkling of what was going to happen next. But lulled I was, and quite without an inkling of the bleakness of my immediate future.
Between the main course and dessert, with two beers in me, I decided I needed to visit the ladies room. I politely excused myself from Lois’s company. I was kind of on a high, in a daze, and I entered the bathroom, turned right into a stall and went about my business without even noticing my surroundings. Which was my big mistake. I should have stayed alert. When I opened the stall door again the first thing I saw was a person standing there, blocking my way. I had a few seconds in which to realize three things.
Firstly, I realized I had not heard anyone come in after me, which meant the person now blocking my egress from the stall had already been here when I entered.
Secondly, I realized that the person blocking my egress was a man, and it crossed my mind to wonder what on earth a man was doing in the ladies’ room.
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