Jack was situated in the master bedroom. Bo and Keith had set themselves up on cots downstairs, while I’d setup camp on a couch and Nikki had taken the other bed upstairs. Keith had taken as much equipment as he could carry from the hideout on City Island and met up with us within a couple hours. There were extra sets of clothing, weapons, ammunition, and food stocks in the loft. It was a little cramped considering we were all supposed to stay put, and no one other than Keith was happy to be here. The only reason the computer geek liked it was the discount electronics shop right across the street.
I might have liked the place better if I could have parked my ass at the Starbucks or the Dunkin’ Donuts down the block instead of having to wait out Jack’s recovery day in and day out inside the apartment. Bo, Nikki, and Keith could come and go as they pleased, but I wasn’t allowed to step foot beyond the building’s front door. No one wanted to risk my being seen by cops or anyone else who might recognize me. It didn’t help my temper that Jason and Adam were also forbidden to wander around. We were the biggest security risks, according to Jack.
Plus we were technically in Moonwalker territory, and who knew what connection, if any, the werewolf pack had to the Weres who had attacked us in the park or what they’d do if they knew I was here. I was reasonably certain I was now on Rohrik Donovan’s shit list, and the local and national news was abuzz about the bodies found in Carl Schurz Park that night. While Patrick’s death was regrettable, it didn’t appear too many people were up in arms over one more dead extremist hunter. Rather, the buzz was focused on speculating about an Other war brewing on the horizon, and that this was just the first skirmish of many to come.
If only they knew.
As often as I put up the argument that I could have been doing more good on the streets, following up on the leads I’d gleaned from Chaz’s computer, Jack wouldn’t hear of it. He sent Bo, Adam, and Jason to check them out instead. Keith let me use one of his laptops so I could keep tabs on any purchases made by Chaz, but other than that I was feeling useless.
Bo had followed my instructions and found what we thought was Kimberly’s office, pretended to be a potential client, and got some song and dance from the answering service that she was currently out of town. It didn’t matter. I used my own resources to find her home address once Bo confirmed her last name for me.
Like with Chaz’s home, it appeared someone was stopping by to handle minor matters, but that nobody had been occupying the place for at least a week or two. It was incredibly frustrating not to be able to go myself and having to rely on the information the men gathered. They were good, but they weren’t private investigators or cops, and didn’t know the little telltales to look for or have the patience for traditional surveillance work. That was a staple of my business.
I didn’t want to cause the bank to flag Chaz’s account for suspicious activity by checking it too often. I limited myself to twice a day, tempted as I was to check it every fifteen minutes to see where that bastard was hiding.
He made a few minor purchases. Fast food, mostly. It wasn’t always in the same part of town, but he was still on Long Island, mostly in Queens and in Nassau County. He stayed roughly in the region of my house and Sara’s. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t think of any mutual friend or other Sunstriker who might be offering Chaz, Dillon, or Kimberly shelter. If he was staying at a hotel, he was using cash on hand, not his card.
If this had been a case for a client, I would have used my computer at the office to hunt down family to call and question. Without access to my accounts and programs, I couldn’t do my job effectively. I couldn’t risk logging in to any of my personal accounts on the Internet for fear of having my IP traced back. Chaz’s car hadn’t been parked by his home to allow us to install a GPS tracker, and I didn’t know what Kimberly or Dillon’s cars looked like, so I couldn’t have the White Hats do an install on theirs.
While the belt had kept me company at night, it wasn’t much help. It kept insisting Royce was responsible for my troubles.
Problem was, I was starting to believe it.
If I hadn’t taken the job for The Circle—my God, was it really less than a year ago?—I never would have found myself tied up with Royce. If the vampire hadn’t become so interested in me, I never would have been beaten, hospitalized, kidnapped, bitten, and bound by blood as a mindless servant. Chaz wouldn’t have been interested in rebuilding our relationship only to let it fail so spectacularly. The police wouldn’t want me in connection with a murder I didn’t commit. My father wouldn’t have disowned me.
I wouldn’t have killed anyone.
The more the belt whispered about all the things that had gone wrong since Royce came into my life, the more I wanted to blame him for my troubles. Which wasn’t right. I knew it wasn’t. But the belt’s words still made me doubt, and that made me want to confront the vampire and find out if this mess he’d made of my life had been his plan for me all along. Had he meant for all these terrible things to happen so I’d be forced to turn to him for help again and again until I wouldn‘t—or couldn’t—leave his side?
There was no doubt in my mind Royce wanted me to return. Hell, he was holding back the information on whatever had happened to Sara, most likely specifically to make me come back to him.
Of course, as soon as I showed up at Royce’s door, he’d never let me leave again. The question remained: Why? What did I mean to him? Why was I so special? No matter how I wracked my brains for answers, I couldn’t figure it out.
So I took the time in confinement to learn about him. Study him. See if I could get into his head. I studied every interview and article about him I could find. He was artful and cagey in all of his responses. Very public relations-oriented. Nothing new there. Most of what I found was not at all useful, just statistics and speculations about his businesses, his charitable contributions, and his public appearances.
The OtherNet, though. That had a few more answers, and none of them were good.
Unsurprisingly, the vampire had an entire thread devoted to him, many pages long. He had even posted on it a couple of times. It was full of sightings, notes of his involvement in certain disappearances, and an estimate of the traffic his business was seeing, both in terms of finance and expansion of his ranks. His popularity was undeniable, as was the scary fact of his power, made clear by the documented instances of him or his minions laying the smack down on competitors. Someone had even posted a few pictures of the aftermath of a battle that Mouse and Royce’s chief of security, Angus MacLeod, had participated in behind some club sometime back in the eighties. Some of the remains were barely recognizable as having been a person.
Royce’s response on the message board was simple, elegant, and chilling, all at once.
We all do what we must to protect our own.
Yeah. Real charming.
It was frustrating that Keith still wouldn’t let me post on the board. I was itching to ask questions. As many as the board answered for me—and make no mistake, it was full of information about Others and their politics that I probably could have happily done without knowing my entire life—it seemed that for every answer I found, two more questions formed in my head.
Out of curiosity, I checked the sub-forums for other cities, just to see what they might hold. There were threads on all of the big names in their local supernatural communities, too. Some were longer and obviously hotter topics than the others, like the ones on Rohrik Donovan and Royce.