by R. J. Blain
“While I suspect you’re correct, someone has to try to keep him in line,” Ben replied. “Emerick tells us you’ve picked Pepper to be your name?”
“It’s an old nickname from a friend of mine. Beats being called Penelope for all eternity.”
“I can’t say I blame you. And you’ve taken our master’s name?”
“If he wants me calling him my master, he’s going to have to work for it, but I might be talked into a polite sir.”
Ben relaxed and smiled. “Then I think we can be allies for the cause of keeping his ego somewhat in check.”
“I might be a young vampire, but I’ve learned it’s wise to avoid asking for miracles. It prevents disappointment.”
Ben’s smile widened into a grin, and Emerick leveled a glare at me.
“So, I see you’ve discovered my dirty familial secret, Ben. I promise you I’m not a spy, but you’re wise to worry. Spying is a tactic my father would use without hesitation. He’d also lower himself to threats, coercion, blackmail, and other assorted methods of getting what he wants. As for the Harlem situation, if he does have plans for the sites beyond lucrative leasing arrangements, I don’t know what his goals are. I’ve been over every legal loophole in real estate for Harlem, all so he can build this utopia for vampires. He’s expecting to transform the area into a playground for the ultra-wealthy. I think he plans on transforming it into premium real estate properties. Why? I couldn’t tell you. You’re absolutely correct about the Francis family. Vampires are considered inferior. Tainted, if you will. But my father’s religion is money, and if vampires can help him earn even more money, so be it. He’d deal with the devil himself if he thought he’d make a profit. My job was simple. I was to keep him legal.”
Ben’s smile vanished, and all four men watched me, the expressions ranging from concerned to annoyed.
Emerick raised his hand and chewed on his thumbnail, his eyes distant. “Completely legal or through use of loopholes?”
I laughed. “As if my father cares about complete legality. He doesn’t. He only cares if he’ll get away with it. Loophole is his favorite word, and the only reason he kept me around was because I’m good at finding loopholes.”
That caught Emerick’s attention, and he lowered his hand. “How good are you at finding loopholes?”
“Good enough my father trusted me over his other corporate lawyers. I couldn’t afford to be just good. I had to be the best. Otherwise, he’d toss me out with the trash. Then he’d toss my mother out with the trash, too, and find some woman who’d give him a proper son to be his heir. But doing that would slow his plans down. He dealt with having me, but only because I made myself useful. Frankly, I’ll be surprised if he hasn’t gotten rid of my mother yet.”
“He hasn’t,” Ben announced. “But he seems to have faith you’re still alive somewhere waiting to be found. The rumor mill currently believes you were taken hostage and likely interrogated for information on the family business. But that theory has been losing weight as none of your father’s plans have been disrupted yet. As there’ve been no ransom requests, that’s lost weight as an option as well. Frankly, no one knows what happened to you, and while becoming a vampire essentially halts the aging process, your appearance at current doesn’t match the images distributed.”
“Makeup. I hated wearing it and wouldn’t whenever I could get away with it.” I shrugged, pointing at my face. “This face? This face never earned any good will from my father. Simple makeup helped. Any functions I might’ve been photographed at, I was likely wearing makeup. If I wasn’t expecting any meetings with clients or leaving the office, I wouldn’t wear any.”
“Yes, I’d say you were rather dolled up for the photographs. In fact, to the point I’d believe the woman in the picture wasn’t you at all.” Emerick smirked, lifted his hand, and snapped his fingers. “The pictures, please. Let’s confirm for ourselves if the woman in the photographs is actually our Pepper.”
Both of my brows shot up. “I haven’t changed that much.”
“Well, you can put the debate to rest.” One of the men at the door reached into his jacket, pulled out a white envelope, and offered it to Emerick, who sent it sailing to the coffee table. “Are these photographs of you?”
I picked up the envelope and dumped the pictures onto the table, spreading them out and flipping them over so I could get a look at them. One photo I isolated, a picture of my mother when she’d been young, to prove I was as much my father’s daughter as my mother’s. A DNA test had confirmed it, closing the door on my father’s hopes of getting rid of me—and my mother—for an upgraded model who might give him his desired son. “The rest are me, this one is not.”
“Who is she?”
“My mother when she was twelve. My father wanted to find evidence I wasn’t his daughter. Ultimately, my parents agreed to have me tested. However disappointing, I am actually his daughter.”
“Told you,” Ben muttered.
Emerick scowled. “Can you tell us more about these pictures?”
I rolled my eyes but organized the photographs by when they’d been taken. I tapped the one of me wearing a sun dress, aged twelve and already well-acquainted with my father’s treacheries. “This is the photograph my father used to try to prove I wasn’t his daughter. Let’s just say my parents had a year-long fight over that one. Honestly, I know exactly why my mother didn’t leave the bastard, and that’s because he cares about one thing: his public image. He would’ve gotten rid of my mother in a permanent fashion. She knew it, I was just learning it, and my father had no scruples about admitting it. In private, of course. In public, with no exception, we were the perfect family.”
Emerick’s eyes narrowed. “Elaborate, if you’d please.”
“In public, the rules were simple. Use proper manners. Never show any signs of anger. Never disagree with my father. I couldn’t disagree with either of my parents, but no matter what the situation, my father was always right. We were expected to smile, be polite, and do as told. Until I went to college, I was there for appearances only. After college, when my father realized I was the top of my class through merit and not because of my status as his daughter, he decided to test me professionally. I performed, so he decided to keep me. He’s always made it clear what he expected of me if I ever wanted to see any inheritance or have any sway in his companies after his death. Until I’d been turned, I’d met all of his expectations.”
Ben and Emerick exchanged looks, and the man who’d brought the photographs retreated to the door. Their nervousness piqued my curiosity, and I watched them both, wondering if they’d reveal their secrets.
“Pepper,” Emerick scolded.
“What?”
“They’re not breakfast.”
“Well, that’s probably a good thing. I’m not hungry.” My lack of hunger and thirst would amaze me for the rest of the night, and once out of sight of the men, I might indulge in a few relieved tears. I’d learned the hard way holding them in only made their escape more brutal, and it’d been a long time.
Too long.
But I’d wait for privacy so I wouldn’t sacrifice what remained of my pride.
“You will be soon enough.”
If I got Ben alone, I’d ask him if the brood’s master was as crazy as I thought. Then again, maybe I wouldn’t. If Emerick was a few cans short of a six pack, that put me in an even worse position for joining forces with him. “Well, right now, I’m not. Is that the only thing that’s got you two so edgy? You’re making me nervous watching you.”
“I believe they’re expecting you to go for my throat for bringing you into the brood. You are the daughter of a known vampire hater, after all.”
“I’m also an unwilling vampire, so that’s a good enough reason to be worried. That’s fair. It’s simple, gentlemen. Don’t attack helpless humans on the street and murder them. If you don’t do that, I’m not going to bother you. If you do, well, I have a bad habit.”
Emerick tossed his he
ad back and laughed. “You’re something else, Pepper. You call your hunts a bad habit?”
“Well, it had become habitual, and even I admit it wasn’t exactly good. So, I call it as I see it. It’s a bad habit. It’s one I doubt I’ll be quitting anytime soon. Honestly, I only did some of it because I didn’t know what would permanently kill a vampire. It worked the first time, so I kept doing it.”
“Don’t fix what isn’t broken?” Still laughing, the master of the Lowrance brood stood and headed for the door. “Make yourself at home. I’m going to look into this issue about your father and see what steps I need to protect your interests. I have a feeling as soon as he finds out where you are, he’ll make a move. What that move will be is anybody’s guess, but I expect nothing good from him.”
As I didn’t, either, I could only nod and hope my choice to go with Emerick’s plans wouldn’t bring disaster to his brood. With my luck, it would.
I should’ve thought about that before making a move, but I couldn’t turn back time.
Five
So much for the myth about vampires being indestructible.
Life had a way of throwing curve balls at me. Unlife did, too.
As though afraid I’d devour every other vampire in his brood, Emerick had left a feast in the kitchen with a note that I could enjoy as much of it as I wanted.
From bacon to a waffle maker ready to do its duty, what I wanted, I could have.
My stomach disagreed with the concept of breakfast, and rather than hunger, the sight of the food triggered the same sort of queasiness that had turned me off eating in the first place. Why would Emerick leave out a feast with the expectation of me actually wanting to eat any of it?
I’d been a glutton last night, and my stomach remembered.
“Problem?” Ben asked from behind me.
“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t understand what?”
I pointed at the excessive amount of food. “Who the hell is going to eat all that?”
“You.”
“Hell no.” I shook my head hard enough my hair whipped. “Not happening. I’ll take a bite and it’ll end in disaster. Just looking at all that is enough to make me sick.”
“Emerick? You might want to come in here,” Ben hollered.
Great. His reaction confirmed the probability I was a freak even among vampires.
It didn’t take long for the brood’s master to make an appearance. “What’s wrong?”
“She’s queasy. You want me to call Giovanni?”
“Giovanni?” While vampires annoyed my father, he had serious issues with Italians, especially ones he believed had any association with the local mafias. Some of his idiocy had brushed off on me, although I was less likely to write someone off due to their heritage than my father. “Who is Giovanni?”
Ben glanced at Emerick, who nodded. “He’s one of the brood’s doctors. We have a few of them. Despite being difficult to kill, we have health issues just like humans. We can get sick, although we recover easier and don’t develop some syndromes like humans. Cancer’s a good example. Vampires just don’t get cancer. We can be injured, though. We heal faster than humans, but an injured vampire is a dangerous vampire, and it’s Giovanni’s job to make certain the healing process goes smoothly.”
“So much for the myth about vampires being indestructible,” I muttered.
Emerick strode to the island and snagged a piece of bacon. “If vampires were truly immortal, we’d drink the world down. No. We’re not. Becoming a vampire is a second lease on life, but it’s not without troubles and dangers. Old vampires are as rare as newly turned women. There comes a point where our second lives become tiresome at best. Most tire of our life after a few hundred years—typically, two. Some walk into the sun and burn to death. Some put themselves into a position to be staked. Some simply fade.”
“Fade?”
“They refuse to eat, refuse to drink, and ultimately starve to death. They will go somewhere remote and dry so they can’t find prey once they’ve weakened.” Emerick claimed another slice of bacon, humming a few notes of some song before he shrugged. “I suspect you’re so used to stretching your meals it’s become a habit, and the queasiness is a warning against overeating. You ate well yesterday, so you’ll be fine. When you start getting hungry or thirsty, tell me. Tonight, Ben will get you a phone. We’ll have emergency contact numbers loaded in for you. I’ll include Giovanni’s number. You’ll want a checkup anyway. How often do you drink?”
“I’d go week or two between each time,” I confessed. “Usually closer to two weeks, but I’d feel my thirst the worst after a week. It takes time to confirm guilt. Sure, I killed. I’m not saying I didn’t. But I never killed indiscriminately. I certainly didn’t kill anyone just because I was thirsty!”
“And it’s been almost a year since you’d tried to eat anything. Fledglings will typically eat everything in sight and then some. Even mature vampires tend to have aggressive appetites. If you’re worried about any of this going to waste, don’t. I’ll just have everyone on the floor raid the kitchen. Everything’ll be gone in ten minutes.”
My brows rose, and I stared at the heaping piles of food. “Is obesity an issue with vampires?”
“Not at all. Vampires don’t produce much in the way of fat. When we do produce fat, it’s easy for us to burn it off. We speculate it’s linked to our inability to produce our own blood. We digest food, but we don’t gain much nutritional benefit from eating, so whenever we do manage to produce fat, it doesn’t last long. Our health is typically linked to the health of our donors; blood is what sustains us. That’s another part of why I only feed my vampires from healthy animals. It’s critical for us to thrive.”
The last thing I wanted was extra complications in my life but complaining about it wouldn’t do me any good. Short of putting myself in a position to be staked, I needed to get my ass in gear and figure out what to do with the rest of my unlife, and that meant dealing with my situation. “Anything else I should know?”
“A great deal, but take your time. No one learns everything right away. I still learn new things about our nature, and I’m older.”
“Surprise, surprise,” I muttered under my breath. “If you expect me to sit around here lazing about and doing nothing, I will pace holes in the floor. Give me something to do. Something useful, please.”
Emerick chuckled. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Before you were attacked, you were a very busy woman. Idle hands lead straight to trouble. I do have something you can do.”
“What?”
“While I get your alias in order and get your license transferred, you can go over the changes in the law since you’ve been on the streets. If there have been any changes that would further your father’s plans, I want to know about it.”
I smiled. That I could do. “I’m going to need a laptop.”
Emerick herded me to an office in his penthouse suite, told me it was mine to use for however long I wanted, and left, promising to return with a laptop and some files. I explored, pleased with the three bookcases, solid desk, and leather chair. The monitor and connector cables would make the laptop tolerable, as would the keyboard and trackpad ready for my use.
I spun in the chair while I waited.
When Emerick returned, he wasn’t alone, and an army of four minions, including Ben, dropped boxes of paperwork on the desk. I grimaced at each thump. “While I said I wanted something to do, I’m not sure I wanted quite this much.”
“These are the law changes since your disappearance across all sectors.”
I eyed the boxes, amazed the politicians managed to change so much in so little time. “It seems things have been busy since I’ve been out of the loop.”
Patting one of the boxes, Emerick flashed me a grin. “This box is dedicated to vampiric rights, and this is the reason why I think your father is so keen to find you. Everything he’s been working on is affected by the contents of this box, and you have al
l his knowledge on the bylaws he’d anticipated for his Harlem project.”
“Someone really pushed through vampiric rights laws?”
“Ben’s box has generic preternatural rights and regulations. Most of it regards criminal and civil law. You’ll find the lack of labor oversight on the government’s part disturbing. I think you’ll find it to be interesting reading. What I’d like you to do is check all the changed laws and tip me off on anything that would help or hinder your father’s plans. If you can figure out his goal for Harlem, I’d appreciate knowing. While my brood won’t be moving into Harlem, enough broods are considering it I’m concerned there’s something amiss.”
I was, too. My father would exploit as many people as possible if given the opportunity. “I can do that. I’ll want a tablet and stylus for the work.”
“I’ll get you one. Anything else?”
“Coffee. So much coffee I enter orbit and you’ll need a spaceship to retrieve me.”
“Pepper, it’s been a year since you’ve had coffee. All I need to accomplish that is to give you a single cup. But if coffee is what you want, coffee is what you’ll have. I take it you drink coffee while going through paperwork?”
“It’s absolutely mandatory.” I smacked my hand against the nearest box. “Absolutely. Mandatory. And I hope you have a proper sized mug. This office has no room for dainty teacups.”
“Good luck, Emerick,” Ben muttered, making his escape. “If she flattens the penthouse, I’m not fixing it.”
Likely afraid they’d be saddled with repairing anything I broke when I got the jitters, the other men fled, too.
“While I understand lawyers are scary, I’m not that bad on coffee. Really.”
“You’re a woman and a lawyer. You’re a woman, a lawyer, and a vampire. Since that wasn’t terrifying enough, you’re a woman, a lawyer, and a vampire capable of killing other vampires without anyone teaching you how. Forgive them for being mere men.”