Jane’s brow wrinkled at my tone. She hesitated before speaking, and when it came out, her voice was small. “I just thought this might be nice in your place,” she said. “You know, for me. To hold my stuff, rather than just that drawer you gave me in your dresser.”
“We’ll see,” I said, distracted. The image of the woman taking the tattoo gun to her own eyes danced across my mind and I shivered.
Jane gave a fake pout. “That sounded less than enthusiastic.”
I sighed. “You’ll have to forgive me,” I said, testiness thick in my voice. “I just watched a love-crazed woman gouge her own eyes out over a guy, so picking out furniture seems a little trivial to me right now.” Snapping at Jane was oh, so easy right now given all Cassie’s feelings of betrayal, vengeance, and jealousy flooding through me. Why couldn’t I shake it off? “We’ll discuss it later. Let’s just try to get out of here without severing a major artery. Step carefully.”
By the time we picked our way out of the debris, we were soaked through from the sprinkler system. As we approached the front door of the store, my phone vibrated. I checked the text message. DEA NOW PLS. SPCL ASGNMNT U & CONNOR. AQ.
“We have to go,” I said. “Downtown to the Lovecraft Café and the Department of Extraordinary Affairs.”
“Not back to bed?” Jane asked, looking even unhappier than she had a minute ago. “We’re not even on tonight. What’s wrong? Please tell me it’s not another zombie infestation.”
I pulled up the gate and held it for her. Jane’s face was a grim mask as she ducked under it. “Possibly,” I said. “I have to go in, anyway. A call came in, requesting Connor and me specifically.”
My stomach sank. Given the tattooist’s emotions still coursing through me, I was glad for the text, secretly hoping it was about a new zombie outbreak that needed dealing with. At least then I could get out some aggression with my retractable bat.
2
We stepped out of the antiques warehouse and back into what looked like an empty shopping mall. The space was cavernous and modern, and rose up several levels above us. Off in the distance floor-to-ceiling windows showed the traffic going around Columbus Circle.
“Very disorienting,” I said. “Coming out of that old antiques shop that feels like it’s down on the docks and back into the modernity of the Gibson-Case Center.” Cassie’s emotions faded as I took in sights other than the mess we had left behind in there.
“Surreal,” Jane added.
“What can I say?” a voice called out from off to our right. “Our kind does Old New York well.”
I turned and looked over at Aidan Christos as he walked toward us. The forty-year-old vampire looked all of eighteen in his skull and bones Hot Topic hoodie, his emo swoop of black hair hanging down into his eyes.
“I appreciate you stopping by,” he said, walking past us and off across the empty mall. When he moved, the steps from his Doc Martens didn’t even make a sound.
“Can you at least pretend to make footsteps?” I asked. “It’s creepy.”
Aidan sighed and clomped around in a slow, deliberate circle. “Better?” he asked, but before I could answer he stopped and stared at us. “You’re wet. Why are you two wet?”
I looked over at Jane and smiled. “That must be those keen vampiric powers of observation I keep hearing about.”
The vampire smiled from within the darkness of the hoodie he wore, the tips of his fangs the only thing visible on the teenage boy’s face. He stood there, glaring at me, and I felt a wave of terror project over me directly coming from him—an oldie but goodie that I was already familiar with in the vampire’s bag of tricks.
“Cut the crap,” I said, pushing past him into the darkened atrium of the Gibson-Case Center, the secret home of New York City’s greatest concentration of vampires. “I’m not in the mood, Aidan.”
Aidan grabbed my arm and stopped me. It was like being grabbed by a stone statue.
“So, how did it go?” he asked. “Did you take care of her? And again, why are you all wet?”
“Oh, we saw her all right,” Jane said. “That’s one creepy bitch.”
“We might be talking some property damage in there,” I said. Aidan looked concerned and I sighed. “Okay, fine. We’re probably talking a lot of property damage in there. There was a small fire and the sprinklers went all Singin’ in the Rain on us, not to mention all the broken lamps . . .”
“There was a fire?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Well, good to see the fire-suppression system works, anyway,” he said. “I’d hate to think of Vampire Central going up in flames.”
I shivered as the images of Cassie taking the needles to her eyes came back to me. “That spirit was messed up,” I said. “You’re going to get a lot of property damage with something like that.”
Jane walked over to Aidan. “You really didn’t have any way of dealing with her?”
“We’re biters and fighters,” Aidan said. “Hard to drain the blood from something you can’t touch. So, as you might have figured out, we’re not really fans of haunting.”
Jane laughed. Aidan and I looked at her.
“Sorry,” she said. “It’s just. . . well, technically, I haunted this place once.”
Aidan shook his head. “We’re not talking about a ghost in the machine here, technomancer. You saw that woman. My master, Brandon, tasked me with checking it out after shoppers started complaining, but, well, there’s really nothing one of my kind can do to something of her kind, you know?”
“Which is why you called in the experts,” I said.
Aidan nodded, and then started walking again. “Believe me, Brandon considers this a huge favor, stopping to check it out.”
“So, why didn’t Brandon ask us himself, I wonder?” I asked.
“Maybe there’s a 90210 marathon on?” Jane offered. “I mean, the great vampire lord did take his name from it, after all.”
Aidan jammed his hands into the pockets of his hoodie and shrugged. “He’s a private guy,” he said. “King of the castle and all that.”
“Literally,” Jane said. “Speaking of which, you never invite us to pop over to your little Epcot Castle anymore.”
Aidan stopped walking once again, looking like a pissed-off teenager despite his fortysomething years. “First of all, it’s far more real than anything at Epcot. Castle Bran is authentic. They moved it here long before I was turned, building this arcology around it to hide it. Secondly, I don’t think just dropping in is all that great an idea nowadays.”
I shook my head and started walking again. Jane followed. “Geez,” I said. “Stop the great vampire/human war and I can’t even get a visitor’s pass? I’m hurt.”
“Give it time,” Aidan said, coming up soundlessly next to us. “You know how it flows differently for us.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “We’ve already got a more pressing date. Business down at the Lovecraft Café.”
The massive glass doors leading out of the atrium to Columbus Circle came into view up ahead. Aidan cocked his head. “I know the night is just starting off for me, but isn’t it a little late for you guys to be calling meetings?”
“No rest for the wicked, or government employees,” Jane said with an enthusiastic smile. As wet and damaged as she was, I don’t know where she found the energy to be so chipper.
“I’m sure something sinister is going down for them to be calling us in now,” I said.
“Brandon may have us under orders to stay out of most human affairs right now, but you did do us this favor,” Aidan said. “So just let me know if you need me. . . you know, if things go bad.”
“Then I should just ask now,” I said. “Ninety percent of this job is cleaning up things that go bad.”
“And the other ninety percent is filing paperwork on it,” Jane said.
“That’s bad math,” I said.
“That may be,” she said, “but we deal with impossible things all the time. You’re suddenly going to start arguing about the math getting wonky now, hon?”