Which sounded like underling-speak for the boss was being a pain in the butt. Was the jealousy a misread on my part? I said, “Ouch. Sooo, because you don’t have instant recall and superpsychic powers of vamp-omniscience, Leo bites your head off?”
She smiled slightly. “Metaphorically speaking.”
“Want me to stake him for you?”
Del spluttered with laughter, which was what I had hoped for, her pale complexion brightening. “I think not. Job security, you know.”
“Yeah. I bet it’d be hard to find a new position as primo in today’s job market.” The words felt familiar, as if I’d said them before. To Del? To Bruiser? Both had changed jobs recently.
Still chuckling, Del stretched her shoulders back and then let them relax. She said, “I’m sorry about my tone in there. Girls’ day out soon? I know this town has excellent spas and I’m dying to try one out.”
I didn’t do girlie stuff, manis and pedis and facials, but I’d had a massage once and it had been fantastic. “Soon,” I promised her with a nod, and then added, “Leo doesn’t understand the concept of monogamous. He’ll protect you with his life and give you anything you want except that.” Without watching for her reaction, I opened the conference room door and slipped back inside.
The lights were off in the room, security footage up on the oversized central monitor screen. A voice in the darkness said, “Legs, I’ll look over the footage again later for anything we might have missed, but so far, nothing shows on the cameras until the rainbow thing, whatever Leo called it, entered the gym.”
“Okay,” I said as I slid into a chair at the head of the table. Belatedly I identified the voice as Angel Tit, one of Derek’s men, a former active-duty marine and IT security specialist. And the scent beside me was Bruiser, silent, watching. He must have come back in through the other entrance. I could feel his eyes on me in the dark. “What?”
“That,” he said. That was digital footage from four cameras, taking up half of the screen, two by two. I’d installed the cameras to cover all aspects of the workout room and its two entrances. The screens showed footage that had been aligned by time stamp to show the moment the creature entered the gym in a flash of light. Instantly, all the cameras had splotches of white-out and partial white-out, in the blocky shapes of ruined digital feed.
Angel said, “I’m piecing together sections of footage that are still okay, so we can get a view of the fight. This is all I got at this time.”
A fifth screen appeared on the far right of the TV and showed the creature entering the room. It was a blister of light, a halo of nothingness with glistening movement to the side that could have been wings, followed by a smoky cloud of out-of-focus, thrashing tail. The camera angle changed, and changed again as it flew across the room. It whipped to Gee and bit him.
“It went straight to Gee,” I said. “I thought it was angling for Leo and got Gee instead. But it targeted Gee DiMercy first. Anybody have any ideas about that?” No one answered, but I could feel a growing discomfort in the room as the snake thing attacked Leo, fought, and finally flew away, then did it again, and again, as Angel replayed the footage. The uneasiness might have been the result of the appearance of what would have passed for a dragon in mythology, or maybe the part where Bruiser and I both vanished from the screen into a haze of gray energies, but whatever caused it, the humans in the room were not happy campers. Fortunately, no footage appeared showing me in half-cat form, and though it was strange that no one brought that up, I decided not to mention it. Discretion being the better part of valor, or I am a scaredy cat, or something like that.
We watched the footage several more times before I said, “Okay. Stop. Is it just me or does anyone else get a different impression of the action from what we saw in the room at the time it happened?”
“I thought my eyes were going bad,” a voice said from the front of the room.
“Nothing I see now is what I saw at the time,” Bruiser agreed. His voice wasn’t worried, but it was far more bland than usual, which was telling in its own way.
“Me neither. That’s not what I saw,” another voice said. Others murmured what they had seen.
“I saw a buncha bats. Nearly crapped my pants.”
“I saw bees, dude. Killer bees. Heard ’em too. Scared the shi— Ooof. Whadju do that for?”
“No cussing around Janie,” Angel Tit said, making it sound like a law.
“I just got dizzy, like someone spiked my drink.”
“I started itching. I got outta there.” Others agreed. The spectators to the sparring had cleared the room fast. Few witnesses had been left to see my partial shift. “Interesting,” I said, feeling a weight lift off of me. “So it makes humans forget they ever saw it. Pretty good survival mechanism. Everyone write up a report and send it to my e-mail.”
There were groans from around the room, the soldier’s universal hatred of after-action reports. Beside me, Bruiser chuckled under his breath. I said, “We need to know if it’s messing with our minds, our eyesight, or our memories.” That shut them up. No one human liked to think their minds might be an open book to some supernat.
I said, “I want to know what everyone saw at the time, versus what we just saw on the footage. Keep the reports brief and get them to me by nightfall. Angel, see if you can sharpen the images or fix the interference or whatever you call the blocky white-out sections. Send it to me ASAP.”
“Yeah, I’ll get right on that. Nice work with the tech lingo, Legs,” he said with unrestrained sarcasm. The men laughed, and some of the tension that had been generated by the meeting dissipated. “Just kiddin’, Janie. I’ll let you know what I find and send the Kid a copy.”
“Good. Lights, please.” We all blinked as our eyes adjusted and someone passed around a mega-sized coffee carafe and a tray full of mugs. Boxes of Krispy Kreme doughnuts followed. I wasn’t interested in the coffee but took a vanilla-cream-filled doughnut and bit into it, the sugary, doughy goodness practically exploding in my mouth. Vanilla cream squished out the small hole and I caught it on a finger and licked it clean. I had to wonder whether the local witches had ever heard of light-dragons, and I pulled my cell to text my best friend, Molly, to ask for me. Eventually, I’d have to meet the local witches myself, but so far, I hadn’t had to add that to my supernatural plate.
Mouth still full, I went on. “Okay. Last thing. Everyone knows about the elevator problems. The Otis people did the online diagnostic and pretty much got what Alex did, so they’re sending out repair people, ones who have worked in a vamp’s household before. They’ll be here at eight in the morning, in”—I looked at the time stamp on the monitor—“just a few hours. There will be two of them, and Alex has done preliminary background and social media checks on both. Neither seem to have overt anti-vamp prejudice, but I don’t want our guests wandering around alone. Eli will oversee their activities if they need to go into the shaft itself. Derek, if you’ll coordinate with him and position a couple more people to keep them in sight at all times?” Leo’s new Enforcer nodded, and I was happy to see him looking more confident about his position. Maybe our little chat at the clan home construction site had helped.
I addressed my next question to Angel Tit at the security console. “Angel? Who has day shift on the cameras?”
“That would still be me. I’m on till noon. I’ll stay over until the repair people are done.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I want them in sight at all times.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What do we do if the rainbow-snake-thing comes back?” Derek asked. The room went dead silent at the disquiet in his voice. I leaned back in my chair as if thinking about his question. When I replied I kept my tone dry and amused. “Try to keep it from eating anyone.”