Our afternoon went by on the college campus, going in and out of dorm rooms accompanied by campus police. I was beginning to feel like I couldn’t do anything on my own when we got back to the squad room around five. It was a whole day spent following other people around, and since this was the other week, I’d have to work Saturday too. I was filled with a perverse desire for a particularly violent and sufficiently distracting case to show up Saturday morning and keep me busy until something broke loose in either of the other two cases. Frankly, I was ready for them to be done, and I told Danny as much as he packed up to head home.
“Sometimes it happens like—”
He started to give me sage advice, but the phone rang. I grabbed it and held out a hand to stop him. My violent and distracting case had decided to show up early, at seven o’clock on Friday.
The vampire working at what was quickly becoming my least favorite brothel, Fairy Tails, had been attacked while with a customer. Even though the attack had happened nearly at dawn, the sun was mostly set by the time we parked the car at the hospital. It seemed the victim wasn’t going to report the incident until Lynn, his superior, forced him. I could only think of one vampire who worked at Fairy Tails, and I had no doubt he’d been the one who didn’t want the police involved. But what he wanted didn’t much matter, he’d been attacked. Whoever had done it wanted to hurt him bad enough that he needed to be rushed to the hospital at a time when getting him there was a problem. They’d waited until vampires were most vulnerable, that magic hour before the sun rises, to hurt him. It was probably a crime of passion, the kind of thing a man finding his wife with her vampire lover might do.
The emergency room was a mad house, with patients stacked in the hallways on gurneys and overworked staff flowing between them avoiding their calls. A nurse directed us to one of the curtained off spaces oblivious to the shouting coming from the other side of the room. She might be able to ignore it, but we couldn’t, especially when someone called for security. Danny ran with them to the emergency, and I opened the curtain, confident I could conduct the interview on my own. My confidence evaporated when I saw the man asleep in the hospital bed.
The skin on his chest looked dead and burned away. The flesh had melted together, blackened and foul. He didn’t have much chest hair, but what few tight brown curls there were melted away at the edges of the angry crater in his chest. The rest of him was still perfect and young the way it would always be. Underneath the harsh hospital lights, he looked older, nineteen instead of seventeen. I was staring at the hole in his chest but couldn’t help but notice the muscles in his arms and stomach.
“Enjoying the view, Detective?” His brown eyes opened with the same conceit I’d last seen in them, despite the circumstances.
“Amadeus, right? I’ll need your last name for the report.”
“Baptiste,” he supplied smoothly.
“And what happened, Mr. Baptiste?” I did my best to stare into his eyes and ignore the naked half of his body.
“I was with a woman, she was…” He took a minute to think. “Do you really want to know? Because I’d be happy to demonstrate…telling you seems so droll.”
“I don’t think you’re in a condition to do that, Mr. Baptiste.” I emphasized the title, hoping he’d get that we weren’t friends.
“It’s only skin deep, you’d be surprised what I can do,” he replied with a smile. It was the same smile from the other day, the one that hinted it knew what I wanted, and promised to fulfill that desire without me even having to say it out loud. There was a noise in the hall, and I took it as an excuse. I was three steps outside of the room when my mind registered the impossible. It was snowing in the corner of the ER.
“Yuki-onna,” a familiar voice said behind me. Detective Auster walked past me and the snow cloud became denser. “I’ve got her, go help Danny.”
I went past the swirling white flakes and felt the cold on my skin. I kept an eye on the mini-blizzard. Ben was shaping it, pulling it together with a magical wind. The power turned his eyes solid yellow, the way mine went white when I practiced death magic. It was fascinating to watch but not so fascinating that I could forget the trouble my partner might be in. I pulled aside another ER curtain. There was a girl half-seated on a gurney, half seated because half of her was snowy mist. She was Asian, stunning, and young. Danny was talking to her softly, but her face was still a cacophony of movement, her eyes and long dark hair the only still things in the swirling snow.
“Partner?”
“She was in a car accident. She needs to be looked at, but I can’t get her to hold form long enough for a doctor to examine her,” Danny explained. I turned to the girl, and at that instant my cell phone rang—because, really when you’re in crisis, that’s when you need to get a phone call. I saw it was Jakob and tossed the phone to Danny.
“I’ll take the girl. You take the call.”
Danny nodded and took my phone out of the room. The minute he left the falling snow slowed down, with only me in the room the girl seemed calmer.
“You can stop; no one’s going to hurt you.” I used my best social worker voice. “You’re not in any trouble.”
“Yes, I am.” She swallowed and inhaled at once. “I was supposed to be studying.”
I nodded and passed her a box of tissues. The more she spoke the more solid she became, but the temperature in the room stayed frosty.
“Was that your mom in the hallway?” I asked.
She started crying again, and I realized I’d taken the wrong approach.
“She’s worried about you. Can you hold still long enough for someone to look at you?”
“Uh-huh,” her bottom lip quivered, and I was sure she’d start bawling. Her head was bleeding pretty badly, but otherwise she looked all right.
“I’ll be right back, okay? Take a deep breath.” I ducked into the hallway where Ben had forced the blizzard into human form. She was tall with dark hair, pure white skin, and almond shaped eyes like her daughter. Unlike her daughter she wasn’t crying or meek, in fact she was yelling loudly at Ben in Japanese. Danny was doing his best to force some kind of a garment on her, but she kept shrugging it off with her empathic gestures. I grabbed the first person in scrubs I saw, who turned out to be a physician’s assistant, and took her to look at the girl. I left the PA as she stitched the girl’s head closed.
In the hallway the scene hadn’t changed, and I decided it was time for some serious intervention. I called my own magic, feeling it come into me in a hospital full of death. No one on this floor was dying, but there was enough above us that I knew my eyes were gone. I stormed to the shouting woman and kept my voice deliberately low.
“Your daughter could be dead,” I hissed. “Don’t you think you should be with her?”
It was a little cruel, using the way I looked as a death witch to get her attention but it worked. She stopped completely. A second passed, maybe two, before she spun on one perfect foot and walked into the room with her daughter. I let the power go, draining out of me in a tiny trickle.
“Well, that was impressive,” Ben said. His own eyes were slowly coming back.
“Oh I think you win the award tonight. What’s a Yuki-onna?” I asked.
“Snow woman.” He shrugged. “She won’t be much more of a problem. Why don’t you two head home?”
“Can’t,” Danny said, and he didn’t look happy about it. “We’ve got a vampire to interview.”
“I can take it,” Ben offered.
“It’s our case.” Danny seemed determined to be miserable.
“Go home, he doesn’t really want to talk to us anyway.” I was just as determined that he go home happy. “We’ll follow up with him tomorrow. I can grab a bus to the train from here.”
“You sure?” he asked, both Ben and I nodded. “Sounds great.” He took two steps away from us and then turned around. “Almost forgot,” he said, handing me back my cell phone. “Jakob’s coming to pick you up.”
“Lovely
.” The two of them had the decency not to laugh.
****
I put my fury into pulling back the curtain on Amadeus’ room, only to find him half dressed. I hastily shut it again to give him some privacy. His pants were on and his belt was buckled, but his shirt was wide open. Someone had covered the wound with a bandage.
“Where are you going?” I demanded.
“Either home or back to work, care to help me decide?” His comment was obviously an allusion to sex. I got it, but I didn’t want to talk about that with him.
“I’m not done interviewing you,” I said, all business.
“Interviewing? Really? You’re not good at it, you know.” He leaned against the bed and looked at me. “You’re supposed to build a relationship, be nice to me, not rip the curtains open.”
“I know how to do my job,” I fumed.
“Well, by all means, please do it then.” He spread his hands wide in a gesture that could have been a bow.
“Did you see who attacked you?”
“No, I didn’t see anyone.”
“Do you have any reason to think this is linked to the other vampire attack at Fairy Tails?”
“Which other vampire attack—one of the ones I’m behind?” Somehow we were back to talking about sex, damn it, the man was frustrating.
“No, the one on Puck.”
“Oh that.” He had long fingers, musician’s fingers, which made sense, with a name like Amadeus he had to play something. He was buttoning his shirt with those fingers, taking longer than he needed to, trying to draw my eye. Damned if it didn’t work. “Isn’t everything in the world linked, Detective? The way death links to life, men link to women, death witches to—”
Jakob ripped the curtains back with more fury than I had used a minute ago. He looked pissed.
“Herr Mueller,” Amadeus said with a tilt of his head. Jakob only looked at him with cold eyes. “I want your permission for my justice.”
“Do you think you can extract it?”
“I would be glad to die trying.”
Jakob nodded and started to leave, but I caught his eye. Amadeus wouldn’t answer my questions, but I suspected he’d tell Jakob anything he wanted to know.
“Who did this?” Jakob asked for me.
“Vianne. She wanted me for her stable, I turned her down.”
“She is a beautiful woman.” Jakob shocked me. He wasn’t lying, but I’d never heard him compliment another vampire.
“Her boys, they perform for her, together. I won’t be part of it.” Somehow I didn’t think we were talking about piano duets. I watched Jakob’s eyes bleed away to red at Amadeus’ words.
“If you wish a second, you have it.”
“Thank you.” The exchange was formal or perhaps just very old. Jakob walked away without another look. I was torn between the possibility of my own dramatic exit and doing my job.
“We’ll be by tomorrow to interview you. When do you wake up?”
“I’ll be up for you anytime, Detective.”
That did it, job or no job, I walked out.
I found Jakob calmly waiting outside the hospital doors. His eyes were back to normal, but he didn’t look happy.
“Can we talk about it?” I asked.
“No.”
“No, meaning not now, or no, meaning not ever?”
“I’d prefer you never think of me that way.”
“Ahh.” It wasn’t the answer I wanted. We barely skimmed over vampire politics the other night in bed. It felt like I should know more, but Jakob didn’t seem to agree. His hands were shoved in his pockets, and his whole body looked tight. Maybe he never wanted to discuss that part of his life with me, the same way he didn’t let me watch him feed.
I looked up at the sky above me. It was clear and cool. The night seemed filled with a thousand stars. “It’s a pretty night; we should leave the top down on our way to the car dealer.”
“Whatever you like, my love,” he agreed.
I ended up back at my apartment so he could make me dinner. We chatted about his day and not mine while I watched him cook. When he got to the topic of Phoebe’s race, I remembered my own big news.
“So I’m running in it.”
“You run?”
“Why does everyone ask that? Yes, I run. I ran track in high school. I was pretty good. Anyway, I sort of have this bet with Danny that I can finish the race in thirty minutes. I don’t think it’ll be any trouble, but it’d be nice if you were there to watch.” Actually, I did think it would be a tiny bit of trouble. My seven minute miles had been a long time ago, and really they were always closer to eight minutes.
“I’d be happy to cheer you on, but I don’t think you’ll need it.” When he smiled at me I almost believed it. I leaned in to give him a kiss when my phone rang, again. Its timing was terrible. I glanced at the caller id before I picked up.
“Hey Isa, what’s up?”
“I have a legal question.”
“I’m not a lawyer.” I sat down on one of the kitchen stools. “But I’ll try to help.”
“Hypothetically, can my church deny someone services because of a criminal background?”
“Hmmm.” I thought it over. “There are no laws on the books that protect ex-criminals, at least none I had to memorize. There are laws about discrimination, but I don’t think felons are a protected class. What’d the guy do?”
“Bad things. Really bad things, and he did them to kids.”
Across from me Jakob started chopping with a lot more anger. The vampire who’d made him did really bad things to little kids, when he wasn’t doing the same terrible things to Jakob. The experience left my boyfriend with scars and prejudices. This phone call wasn’t going to help him have a good night.
“Yeah I don’t think any judge in the world would be on that criminal’s side. Assuming the guy ever brought a case. Is he trying to come to church or lead the youth group?”
Jakob dropped a frying pan. It clattered to the floor, but Isaura barely paused.
“No, it’s nothing like that. That’d be easier, it’s about the—” She stopped abruptly. “Actually it’s all hypothetical. Just a question, that sort of thing.”
She tried to laugh it off, but I knew better.
“Is there a lawyer in the church? Or one who works for the church? Do churches have lawyers?” I asked Isa, but Jakob answered.
“I might be able to help.” He didn’t turn around, and I wished I could have seen his face. “Tell Isaura to call me at work on Monday. I know some attorneys who can donate their time.”
I relayed his message, sure when he said ‘donate their time’ he meant he would pay their fees. Isaura thanked me but swore again that the conversation was hypothetical. I got the feeling she wasn’t supposed to be talking to me about it. I almost asked her about the Jeep but caught myself. Now really wasn’t the time.
I tried my best to put Jakob in a better mood, but dinner was grim.
“Ready to go car shopping?” I asked, grateful to see a gleam in his eye at the prospect.
“I hope so, we’re almost late for our first appointment.”
****
Our first appointment turned out to be a Bentley dealer. Jakob had picked up on my lack of enthusiasm for German cars and turned toward British. I wondered where America and Japan fell on the list of acceptable automakers. The Bentleys all struck me as old, stodgy, and boring. We spent half an hour there to be polite and then headed to the second dealership, one with a broader range. Thankfully it stocked several different lines of cars. We met a dealer who realized early on that I wasn’t enthusiastic and kept mostly quiet while Jakob steered me toward the Hummers. The salesman opened the door for me and I sat inside, suddenly ten feet off the ground.
“What do you think?” Jakob asked.
“It’s a Hummer,” I pointed out the obvious with a dry tone.
“You’d be safe.”
“I’d be killing the environment.”
“But you�
��d be safe when you do it,” he countered.
“No.”
“Fine.”
He offered me his hand, and I jumped down. We walked across the lot in the cool night air, the salesman trailing after us.
“This one is better for the environment.” The salesman put in when he opened the next door. He was right, the Mini-Cooper was definitely better for the world than the gas guzzling Hummer. It was also cute, but not cute in a way I liked.
“No.”
“What are you looking for?” he asked. I could hear the exasperation in his voice. I wasn’t an easy sell. I took a minute to think about the perfect car.
“A Jeep.” I hadn’t meant to say it; it slipped out.
“We don’t sell those.”
“No, I mean, yes, you’re right. The Jeep I want isn’t really for sale anyway; it was a limited edition.” How much longer until Isaura held that drawing? Was that what her phone call was about? Had I already lost? Until the Jeep was gone, I mean really gone with no chance I could ever have it, I’d be comparing every other car to it. “What’s over there?”
“The MGs,” he answered. Jakob wisely kept his mouth shut.
“Let’s look at them,” I said. It was hard to keep from hoping there’d be another case to call me away.
****
None of the cars of at the second dealership worked either, but by then it was getting late.
“Too bad you have to get to work,” I said as Jakob drove off the lot. “Looks like we’re done for the night.”
“I could go in a bit late,” he offered.
“Oh I wouldn’t want you to do that.” We were driving through downtown on a Friday night. The world seemed filled with people out having a good time. A woman in a seat festooned with birthday balloons caught my eye. “I’ve got an idea about my birthday.”
“What’s that?” he spoke a little too quickly.
“I think I want to have dinner at Satin. Are you hiding something?”
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