11

Via the world’s most circuitous route, we returned to the hotel about an hour before dawn. I had to carry Elizabeth up into the room, partly because she was still unconscious, and partly because Adrian refused to help me.

“Oh no. She’s your pet project. You deal with her.”

“If you’re my ghoul, then she’s your—”

“Forget it. This ghoul shit can go out the window.”

“Not if you want to pass in Atlanta, it won’t. We should practice. This would be good practice; here, take her arm.”

“No.”

So I was the one who wrangled her up the elevator and to the relative safety of our hotel room. I dropped Elizabeth on the bed just before remembering we were both still kind of wet from our adventures, so I swooped her up again and deposited her on the love-seat-type settee up against the window. It’d probably wind up being her bed anyway. Might as well let her get comfortable, or get out of my way as the case may be.

Then I set to peeling off my own wet garb and simultaneously digging round in my rolly case for something clean and dry.

Adrian did likewise over on his side of the room, trying to pretend that he wasn’t so mad that he could barely stand to look at me. He’s not a very good pretender. He blew it when he asked, “Tell me again what the fuck we’re going to do with this woman?”

“For starters, we’re going to let her rest.”

“And then what? Am I in charge of her while you’re asleep? Is that the cunning plan?”

“It’d be nice if you keep her off me while I’m napping. I don’t want to make a mega-mess for housekeeping in our wake—certainly not the kind of thing that might prompt them to contact the authorities. So yeah, do me a favor and mind her while I’m out.”

“I swear to God, I can’t imagine what you were thinking …”

I threw my hands up. “I was thinking, Shit, this lady is really powerful and kind of fucked-up, but maybe she needs a little help and not a violent take-down.”

“I don’t believe you for a second. I think you’ve got some weird mommy-complex going on.”

“You take that back!”

“I won’t,” he declared, breaking eye contact long enough to pull his tuxedo shirt off and throw it at the curtains for no apparent reason. “It’s obvious—you’ve met this woman who’s old enough to be your … well, she looks old enough to be your mother, and she’s as crazy as you are. Maybe even crazier! And you think, Hey, I have to help her because we’re, we’re, I don’t know. From the same planet or something.”

He’s an asshole when he’s being smart, but he’s hard to argue with. “Okay, I don’t see it like that,” I partially lied, because I could totally see the sense in what he was saying. “But even if every word were true, who cares? I grabbed her, I brought her here, and more important, I scored the bones.”

“You scored her and the bones. One of these things you can sell. One of these things you might be stuck with for a while!”

“So goddamn shortsighted,” I accused as I turned away from him, unfastened my bra, and peeled it off my chest. It made a slurping sound as it unstuck from my boobs. While I still had my back to him, I yanked a T-shirt on over my head. “We can sell the bones, yes. I’ll call Horace and let him know I have them, first thing tomorrow night. But Ms. Creed over there … she can stay with us, or head off on her own. She might be a little unbalanced, but she’s an adult. All I did was rescue her from the NASA security goons. I didn’t adopt her. I’m not going to get her spayed and find her a good home.”

“You ever tell yourself that about Pepper and Domino?”

“All the time, but that’s different. These days, I kind of need them. Or Ian does.”

“These days, yeah. Whatever lets you sleep at night.”

“I sleep like a stoner, and it’s no business of yours whom I rescue, adopt, or kick to the curb. You’re not even really my ghoul, anyway. If you were, you might be in some place to criticize—but of course, if you were really my ghoul, you wouldn’t dare. You’d have too much sense for that.”

“Maybe we should put this whole ‘ghoul’ thing to bed right now—it’s not going to work.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more,” I said. I held the absolutely trashed Chanel in my hands and tried not to cry. It was a stupid thing to cry over, but I’d bought it new, when I was young. And I wondered if I could save it, because I’m a sentimental loony. “So obviously,” I said, feeling spiteful at the world and aiming it at him, “you can’t come with me to Atlanta.”

“Say what now?”

“You heard me. If you can’t pass as my ghoul, you won’t survive the Barrington Household. So forget it. You’re headed back to Seattle tomorrow.”

“Like hell I am.” He did a 180. “I’ll fake it so good, you’ll give me an Oscar when we get home.”

“You haven’t done much to demonstrate it yet. Don’t you understand? Ghouls are deferential, they’re quiet, and they’re useful. You aren’t any of those things. Ever.”

“I learned on the fly in San Francisco.”

“That was for the span of half an hour. And you weren’t great, even for that long. Look, I know you think I’m laying this on thick because I want a lackey, but that’s not the case. I’ve never had a lackey before, I don’t like lackeys, and I particularly don’t like ghouls, if you’ll recall. Ergo, the fact that you’re the world’s worst ghoul is a huge point in your favor from a personal standpoint, but it’ll get you killed in the kind of scenario I’m looking at in Georgia.”

“Obviously, I’ll fake it better in Georgia. I’m much better at kissing ass when my life is on the line.”

“Not good enough,” I countered. “I can handle the trip myself, and if you can’t convince me otherwise by next nightfall, you’re going home.”

He looked like he wanted to call me names—creative names, names that I’d write down and use again for how awful and brilliant they were—but he swallowed them down and only glared. Then he said, “You’re im-fucking-possible.”

“I am also exhausted and to paraphrase the bard—here comes the sun.” I drew the curtains shut and fastened them with the binder clips I’d picked up on a whim a few days previously. They’re perfect for the job—cheap, portable, and efficient. “So if you don’t mind, I’m going to burrito myself up in the comforter and call it a day. If you want to prove to me what an awesome ghoul you’re capable of being, perhaps you’ll consider helping Ms. Creed get her shit together while I’m not looking.”

I kicked my mutilated shoes under the bed, grabbed the comforter, and swathed myself therein—pulling the covers up over my head until I couldn’t see a thing, including the thing I least wanted to see. (Read: The expression on Adrian’s face, which no doubt could’ve killed dandelions.)

Much to my surprise, he didn’t say anything.

I kept waiting for it, lying there wondering when the retort would come. But it didn’t. And before long I fell asleep.

I awakened however-many-number-of-hours later to the soft sound of voices, and I was somewhat confused. Was it the television? Not unless Adrian was on TV, which felt unlikely. Then who the hell was he talking to?

Oh yeah.

Her.

I extricated myself from the blankets with about as much grace and speed as you’d expect, then rubbed at my eyes to clear them—revealing Adrian and Elizabeth sitting on either side of a small table they’d pulled away from the wall to sit between them. Upon this table was a game of what appeared to be gin rummy.

The rustling of my unfurling drew their attention. Elizabeth folded her cards down onto her lap and said, “Good evening,” like this was the most normal thing in the whole world, sitting in a room with an off-duty drag queen and a vampire, playing cards.

“Back at you,” I mumbled. “Who’s winning?”

Adrian responded, “This round, she is. I won the last one. We’ve just been killing time.”

“Waiting for me to wake up? How thoughtful.”

“Waiting for Elizabeth’s flight. She’s heading out in another two hours. Had to get her a red-eye; it was all I could arrange on short notice.”

“On the Internet?” I assumed.

“With your credit card,” he nodded. “Also, we went shopping.”

“I’m sure you exercised restraint.” I was sure he hadn’t, just to get back at me.

“Absolutely,” he lied. “She needed some clothes. I needed some retail therapy.”

“Perfectly understandable. I hope everyone had a marvelous time on my dime.” I stood up and stretched, and cracked my back. Everything ached, but no worse than the night before—which was a step in the right direction as far as I was concerned. No worse was becoming equivalent to “good times.”

I eyed my roommates with suspicion. They were getting along, successfully playing leisure games. They’d gone shopping. Elizabeth had showered and brushed her silvering hair, and was wearing something tasteful but simple—a white classic button-up and khaki slacks with brown Eastlands. Adrian was wearing new jeans (dark wash, boot cut) and an oatmeal-colored Henley. They looked civilized and innocent, so clearly I must have been missing something.

At the end of my visual appraisal, it occurred to me to ask, “Wait. Plane ticket to where?” Even as I suspected the answer.

“Seattle, of course.” Adrian said it lightly, casually. Almost coldly, but you had to know what to listen for.

Elizabeth said, “He told me about your home, the building in Seattle where the homeless children live, and your blind friend.”

“Ah.” I almost started yelling at Adrian that he shouldn’t tell people about Ian like that, but what was it going to hurt? “What else did he tell you? Anything interesting?”

“He said you’re a vampire, but I’m okay with that. And I want to thank you for your generous offer to keep me there for a while. I’m not sure what I did to deserve it, but I could use a place to lie low. I’m not saying that the cops were right on my tail or anything, but a simple scry told me that people were beginning to question the coincidence.”

I said, “Right. Yes. Well. You’re welcome, of course. Adrian lives in Seattle, too, you know. I’m glad you two get along. I expect you’ll be seeing a lot of him.”

She laughed. “That’s funny. A lot of him, yes.”

“What?”

“I told her about Neighbors, and the drag show. You’ll have to bring her, one of these nights.”

“One of these nights, sure. I don’t suppose you told her the address, or anything? So she knows where to go when she gets into town?”

“I’ve arranged for a car service to pick her up under the name of Meredith Hand. And I’ve already called Ian and given him the heads-up.”

“How … efficient of you.”

I’d be lying if I said I was utterly shocked that Adrian had made these arrangements. I wasn’t shocked; I was only somewhat surprised. He’d certainly done a thorough job of it, to give him due credit. And, I mean, come on. It’s not like his vindictiveness came as a huge, heart-stopping betrayal or anything.

Besides, the longer I stood there like a dummy, the more I was actually okay with it. Was it a bad idea? Yes. A terrible one. But wasn’t it what I wanted, in a warped way? Kind of. My feelings on the matter were too complicated to focus into an Official Position.

I went out on a limb and asked a silly question. “Just one plane ticket to Seattle?”

“Yeah, just the one. I figured maybe I’d tag along with you to Atlanta. Our flight leaves an hour after hers.”

If I was going to pick a fight with him, this was the moment.

But I let it pass. I sighed, sat down on Adrian’s side of the bed (it had a better view of the television), and picked up the remote. “Two hours to departure, huh?”

Elizabeth answered. “That’s right. We thought we’d leave as soon as you got up. I don’t think I have anything that’ll get me stopped by security, and I have my own ID under … not the name you know. I like to leave myself plenty of wiggle room.”

“That’s fine,” I said. Then I broached the money thing, because it’d better come up sooner rather than later. “Now about those bones—”

She said, “Clearly they’re yours now. You stole them from me fair and square, and it’s not as if I don’t owe you for the hospitality.”

“About that …” I tapped my fingers on the duffel bag I held beside my lap and did some very hasty thinking. I unzipped the bag and asked, before I could start counting, “How many bones are left?”

She answered fast. “Thirteen.”

“An auspicious number,” I mused, noting that she wasn’t lying. They were all there, bundled together. “But I suspect Horace can be convinced you’ve burned through a few of them. I don’t have to give him the whole batch.”

“Horace?”

“The lying weasel, as previously discussed.”

“When?”

“Last night,” I said, slightly perturbed by her failure to recall—but I didn’t call attention to it. It might not’ve been a mental illness thing. It might’ve just been a side effect of a crazy night and a whole lot of magic floating around. “He’s the guy who tried to buy the bones on the antique parade thing, but don’t worry about him. I’ll take care of him.”

“You’re selling him the bones?”

“Let’s say instead that I’m passing them along for a very healthy commission.”

She pondered this, and said, “Millions. That’s what you could get for thirteen bones.”

To which I replied, “Yes, and he can still get millions for fewer than that. Say, eight or nine of them. We’ll just tell Horace that you blew a handful of them practicing your spells.”

Adrian shot me a confused look, then his face lightened. He knew me so well, it surely had nothing to do with the blood link. “You want to save a few?”

“To sell them on the side?” Elizabeth asked quizzically, since she didn’t know me as well as my faux-ghoul did.

He told her, “No, no. She wants to save them as insurance.”

“Against what?”

“Against future trouble.”

“But I don’t intend to make any trouble for you,” she objected. “I got Buck Penny, and I undid my marriage.”

“I’m sorry … you did what?”

“Penny’s dead, I’m sure. And the marriage never happened.”

Adrian frowned, but didn’t contradict her. Our gazes met and we fired a whole silent conversation back and forth between us, transmitted via eyebrow wiggles, mostly amounting to, “She’s nuts, right?” “Yeah, I think so.” “Can you undo the past?” “I have no idea.” “Let her think what she wants.” “Okay.”

Moving right along without arguing, I clarified. “We’re on our own up there in Seattle; we don’t have a House to protect us.” She was about to ask me what a House had to do with anything, but I headed her off at the pass. “Not a house like what you live in; vampire Houses are organizational structures, and they can be useful. They can be much worse than useful if you don’t belong to one. That’s the short version of what I’m getting at.”

“I think I see,” she said slowly. “You want … to keep these bones … so that I can use them? To protect you and your friends?”

“Well, if you’re going to be hanging around, you might as well make yourself useful. Are you willing to use them for vengeance-free purposes? For that matter, are you capable of doing so? Or is some dramatic motive required to make them work?”

“I’m capable, don’t worry about that. But doesn’t it require a certain measure of trust on your part? What if … I hate to say it, but what if I have … you know. An episode? Tonight I feel good. I’ve had my medication for the first time in a few weeks so I feel fuzzy, but mostly secure.”

“We stopped to refill it,” Adrian chimed in.

I considered this a very worthy use of funds, but to say so might’ve come off wrong, so I only nodded. “I know how it goes,” I said, because I did. “We’ll work something out. Let me think about it, and we’ll discuss it when I get home. For now, I’ll keep the bones with me.”

“I understand.” It was funny. When her eyes weren’t glowing and she wasn’t chanting, she seemed almost normal. Not quite, but almost. She still had a tense, feral posture that said she anticipated trouble—maybe from within—at all times. And every now and again, her eyes would twitch or her head would cock, like she was looking for something or listening for something that wasn’t there. But all things being equal, she didn’t come off any nuttier than somebody’s favorite aunt with a bunch of cats.

I thought of Pita and realized I was heading down that road myself. I might only have one cat, but I sure was amassing a collection of other strays.

“So that’s settled,” I announced. “You’ll head back to my place, and Ian and Domino will help you get settled in to some corner of the flat or another. They’ll bring you up to speed on the ground rules, not that there are very many of those. Meanwhile, me and Adrian will head for Atlanta, where everything will go smoothly and no one will get hurt, and everyone will have a productive time learning a great many useful things.”

Elizabeth scooped her cards up into her palm and set them on the table with the rest of the pile. She gave me a funny look. “Right. I know sarcasm when I hear it, but I hope things go half that well, at least.”

“It’s not sarcasm so much as desperate optimism. And mostly for the second half of what I just said. Actually, I’m pretty sure you’ll be fine in Seattle, assuming your trip is uneventful and the car is there waiting. And I’m still holding on to the bones.”

She said, “I can make plenty of trouble without them, you know.” And it didn’t sound like she was bragging.

I hesitated. “Is that a threat?”

“It’s full disclosure.”

“Okay. Good to know.”

Adrian was beaming at me with triumph, smugness, and something else—a faint mirroring of my hopeful desperation, I think. He knew just how hard we were bullshitting here, after all.

But the first half of my cheery prediction went down without any aggravation. In another hour, we’d bundled up Elizabeth with her duffel bag stuffed with toiletries and what few personal items she’d had on her when I’d nabbed her. Then drove her to the airport in Adrian’s rental.

Again, in his quest to prove he could be a useful ghoul-type assistant, Adrian had snuck out and dumped the Hummer a couple miles away—in the kind of neighborhood where it’d be stripped down to the frame within hours, or that was the plan. I didn’t have any serious fears that it’d be tracked back to us; we were on the guest list under pseudonyms, and according to the local news, the Johnson Space Center was flattened and crawling with chaos.

At least twenty people had died in Hurricane Elizabeth, as I’d come to think of it. Another hundred had been hurt, dozens of cars had been destroyed, several buildings had been ground down to sea level, and many others had been so badly damaged that they would be covered in scaffolding for months to come.

Something told me no one would be making too many hard-hitting inquiries into one missing vehicle. For all anyone knew, it might’ve been blown to the top of the museum roof. It sounds batty, but that’s where they found Buck Penny’s Mercedes.

Speaking of the target himself, I didn’t know if Elizabeth had actually gotten him or not. The newspeople weren’t naming the dead until all families could be notified, and the Internet didn’t seem to know … so either the situation was messier than it sounded (making it truly epic), or someone was being very careful to keep the particulars quiet.

I couldn’t help but wonder if Elizabeth hadn’t inadvertently damaged some national-secret-type thing that the feebs were looking to cap. If she had done so, it almost certainly hadn’t been deliberate, but that wouldn’t change anything.

As I’d learned the hard way over the last year, there’s no reason to underestimate (a) money, or (b) the government’s capacity for persistence and secrecy.

So whatever mayhem had occurred over on the other side of Houston, it wasn’t my problem and I couldn’t see myself getting too worked up about it. Privately, I thought it was an egregious case of overkill and lunacy, but somehow that didn’t bother me.

Although when I thought about it too hard—and I eventually think about everything too hard—I wondered if it was a good idea to send this unstable woman into a household of people who frankly weren’t in the world’s best position to defend themselves if things were to go wacky. If Elizabeth had another “episode,” would they be able to manage her? Or in lieu of that, defend themselves?

Dear God, what if she decided she wanted to “undo” them, or whatever? Maybe she undid her marriage, and maybe she’s got quantum magic scrambling her brain, I don’t know—but I was shipping her home to camp out with the kids.

But shit, life is full of risks. As it turns out, so is the afterlife.

Anyway, the kids already lived with two vampires, including one with a nasty case of post-traumatic stress disorder and an inability to see where he was throwing things. It’s not like they were living in Nerf City. One more homicidal maniac shouldn’t make much difference, or that’s what I told myself as I waved at Elizabeth from the send-off spot outside the security checkpoint.

Soon she was gone, slipped through the scanner without a hitch, and headed toward the terminal where she’d catch her flight back to my place. My stomach felt sour, and the farther away from us she got, the less confident I became.

I smiled at Adrian anyway.

“What are you grinning about?” he asked, sensing that I was full of shit.

“One thing down, one to go. We got the bones. Now we just have to get in and out of Atlanta alive, because tomorrow’s our last night to do so. The convocation goes down the night after that.”

We already had our tickets, though our flight left an hour later—so we had time to kill before it was worth submitting ourselves to the TSA tickle.

“I knew you’d cave,” he said to me.

“Cave on what?”

“Your vow that I wouldn’t come with you to Georgia.”

“Don’t get too self-righteous. I knew if I dangled that carrot over your head, you’d take care of my incidentals and do a decent job of it. Really, I just wanted you to get Elizabeth squared away and ditch the getaway car.”

“I bet. You just magically planted those ideas in my brain.”

“I didn’t say that,” I argued. “Those things needed to be done, and I couldn’t do them while I was out cold for the day. But you would’ve half-assed them or ignored them without some positive reinforcement.”

I expected it to piss him off, but he only shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. It wasn’t that big a deal, and now you have to bring me along. Totally worth it.”

“I don’t have to do anything.”

“Yeah you do. Now you do, anyway.”

“Whatever. What I’m saying is, don’t get too full of yourself. I could jettison you tomorrow and get a lot more work done.”

“Not during the daytime.”

“Fuck you.”

“Yes ma’am,” he said happily.

We spent the rest of our downtime plotting in a wine bar I found, sorting out our story—nailing down our cover until he could recite everything blindfolded, backward underwater, and drunk. It was the equivalent of drilling a name, rank, and serial number into his brain, so it worked admirably.

The tutoring (which continued all throughout our subsequent flight) might have been helped by our psychic link, which we played with a little bit—testing its abilities and limitations. We didn’t learn anything we didn’t already know, but I considered it a useful exercise all the same. In Atlanta, we’d need to feign the ability to communicate cleanly without speaking to one another; and in truth, we’d only sort of figured out the particulars of how it actually worked.

It was rather like that old adage about a watched pot never boiling. The harder we tried, the less it worked. But on a lark, as a sudden “shout” or a thoughtless jab, it came through loud and clear.

I strongly considered pestering him to see if I could get him interested in drinking more of my blood. Likewise, he was strongly considering asking me if I’d provide some. In the end, neither of us brought it up, having independently decided that it was more trouble than we wanted.

All in all, he did quite well.

I taught him everything I could remember about House rules and regulations, about the behavior expected of ghouls, and about how we’d be expected to treat each other. I also told him everything I knew about the Barringtons, which didn’t take long, because I didn’t know volumes upon volumes when it came to the House. Mostly I’d heard stories about that weird, violent, insular crew, and secondhand information is better than no information at all—but not much. Even so, I threw in every scrap of gossip I’d ever heard, on the off chance any of it proved to be true or useful. He absorbed it like an expensive paper towel.

By the time we’d landed at Hartsfield in Georgia, he was even in the habit of cringing when I glared at him the right way.

It unnerved me, though not in a pile-on-some-fear way. He was doing a good job—exactly what I asked of him—but it was turning him into someone else … someone I didn’t like much. Someone I didn’t have any respect for.

This made him a good actor, and it shouldn’t have surprised me. But it did. And hearing him call me “mistress” gave me a warm, unwelcome indigestion feeling in my throat. I pretended that all of this was fine and we were unlikely to get killed within the next forty-eight hours.

We made our hotel without much time to spare, settling into a suite that Adrian had reserved for us the night before in the big Marriott Marquis, which looks sort of like the inside of a UFO as designed in the eighties.

(It is true that I used to have a secondary safe house in Atlanta, but I lost it when I lost my last identity. That’s one of the drawbacks of doing a nuclear reset on your personhood—some of your possessions get claimed by the state, since you seem to have died and not left a will.)

Before I was really ready to settle in, dawn was creeping up outside, flushing the far side of the curtains. I could feel it approaching, like the footsteps of someone unpleasant coming up the stairs.

That day, my dreams were strange and unsettling.

I didn’t remember them well when I awoke; they just stuck with me in the form of a groggy sense of nausea, and the irrational certainty that I was forgetting something important. But when sundown came a dozen hours later, it was time to get moving, dream-sickness or no.

I got up, got myself dressed, and braced myself for the night to come.

Adrian was ready to go by the time I was ready to open the curtains, but as I’ve mentioned before, that’s easy when you don’t have to sleep all day. I don’t know if I was supposed to be proud of him or what, but it’s not like it’s tough to outfox me when I’m out cold.

Still, I didn’t like this tension between us. A few days before we’d been chatty and friendly as the evening got under way. Now we weren’t talking. We weren’t even making a lot of eye contact. Neither one of us was happy, and both of us were nervous. But if we could survive this together, everything could get back to normal.

Right?

Just this one last hurdle.

Well, one last hurdle and then the obvious, looming hurdle of what to do about Ian and the San Francisco gang, but I couldn’t think about that yet. One horrible thing at a time, thanks.

My partner-in-crime fussed for “breakfast,” but I urged him to stay close to the hotel. We’d picked up a rental at the airport—a 2009 Lexus; don’t ask me why Adrian had to go all high-end on us all of a sudden—but it’d been parked downstairs in the garage, and the hassle of moving it didn’t feel appealing. Five minutes on the Internet told him there was a twenty-four-hour diner three blocks away, so he hoofed it and I stayed put, wrapping up the last of those last-minute details like the obsessive nutter I am.

I had email from Ian. If the note could be believed, he was still in Seattle. I didn’t think he’d lie, but the deeper I went down this rabbit hole, the more I learned about how little I knew—so there was always the possibility that he was humoring me, and he’d stuck out his thumb and headed down to California.

I refused to assume the worst.

Or rather, I quietly assumed the worst, but ignored it—focusing instead on convincing myself that everything was running According To Plan. God was in his heaven, my Ian was in Washington, and all was right with the world. All I had to do to keep it that way was stroll into the lion’s den, solve a murder, and stroll back out again without getting me or my not-a-ghoul killed.

Easy-peasy.

Rather than dial up Ian and run the risk of him not answering (because he was dead in a ditch someplace, or he was avoiding me, or his brother was busy burning him down to ashes), I made a phone call to Maximilian in San Francisco. Max confirmed that he’d emailed the documents to give me seneschal proxy, and they’d been accepted and acknowledged by the Barringtons. This meant they were expecting me—a prospect that should have been a relief, but wasn’t.

This was my first and last night on the case. If I couldn’t provide results, Ian would be screwed. Even if I could provide results, he might still be screwed—but if I could make Atlanta look bad enough, the Barringtons would back off long enough to give Max some breathing room … and me time to think of a more permanent way to get Max off Ian’s case.

At my request, Max forwarded me a copy of his email with the document attached, and after we hung up, I logged on to take a peek at it. How incongruous it felt, with its semi-archaic language and formality. Once upon a time, hundreds of years ago, such things would’ve been handwritten on parchment, sealed with wax and the ring of somebody important, and delivered in person.

My, how things have changed.

Jesus. And that was just the beginning. I was amused to note both that his middle name was “Arnold” and that he’d looked me up by my new fake identity, Emily Benton. I hadn’t told him what it was, so he was obviously showing off. No big whoop. Having a public face that’s relatively easy to find is part of what a disposable identity is all about.

I wasn’t worried that he’d track down my homestead and thereby his wayward brother, though. I didn’t own the building as Emily Benton. I owned it as the estate of someone named David Peterson, who had died ten years previously. In theory, David has a son named Gerald who operates the estate’s affairs. It’s a little complicated and utterly untraceable back to me—which is exactly how I like it.

While I was hanging around wrapping up loose ends, I also called Horace.

He answered on the first ring. “Tell me you got them this time.”

“They’re sitting right here beside me,” I fibbed.

“Excellent! How many did that deranged bitch burn up?”

“I don’t know. You never said how many she started with. But there are nine unmolested, so to speak.”

“Nine?” he shouted in my ear.

Innocently I asked, “What? Were you expecting more than that?”

“There should’ve been at least fifteen or sixteen. How … how the hell? What the fuck was she doing to burn through so many of them?”

“I have no idea. Practicing?”

“Practicing?” He shut up, but only for a conversational beat. “Hypothetically possible, but I doubt it. You don’t just fiddle with those things. They require an expert hand, and people who aren’t experts tend to blow themselves up in the learning process.”

“That sounds counterproductive. From a Darwinian standpoint, I mean. How do you get to be an expert if studying to become an expert is fatal?”

“It’s not always fatal. But it’s a messy enough learning process that not everyone survives it, that’s all I’m saying. Maybe she was up to some mayhem off the grid,” he pondered.

I let him go right on pondering. “It’s not like we were watching her every move. Chasing her down with credit card receipts is like playing connect-the-dots. There’s a lot of blank space in between.”

“True, true. But fuck me, only nine of them left?”

“Sorry.”

“Hm. Well, it’s still a lot of money.”

“And there’s no sense crying over spilled … what? Millions?”

“It depends on which ones she used. Can you look through them and tell me?”

“Seriously? You just now asked me to identify penis bones for you?”

He sighed heavily. “Raylene, they were marked, remember? Little dick-tags? You can read, I’m pretty sure.”

“Oh, yeah. I forgot about that. Hang on.”

I went to the edge of the bed and dug out the bones. I unrolled them from their bubble strip as if they were makeup tools in a pouch, and I squinted at the tiny handwritten labels that had been Scotch-taped to the ends.

“Holy shit, whoever wrote these things had terrible handwriting. Um, I see two lycanthropes, a djinn—seriously? A genie weenie?—a centaur, a …” I sounded out the word, “cockatrice? I don’t even know what that is.”

“Chicken–lizard hybrid.”

I almost accused him of shitting me, but restrained myself. “Right. One chicken–lizard hybrid, plus, let me see,” I muttered. “One gnome, or I think that’s what it says. One … I can’t tell what this one says.” I turned it over in my hand, attempting to guess the size of whatever creature once sported it in a dangling fashion.

“Spell it.”

“S … e … s … q … u … a … c.”

He thought about it momentarily, then said, “Bigfoot.”

“Bullshit.”

“No bullshit, Bigfoot. That’s the old Indian word for them.”

“I guess it kind of looks like Sasquatch.”

“No coincidence, there,” he told me. “Now. Go on. What else?”

“Bunyip?” I confessed, “I don’t know what that is, either.”

“Australian beastie. It’s a lake monster that looks like a walrus crossed with a horse.”

“Now you’re just making things up.”

“No, I’m not. And what’s the last one?”

“Last one?” For a minute, I almost contradicted him like a dumbass, having forgotten I was holding a few of these things in reserve. I chose one at random. “Incubus.”

“Incubus?” His voice pitched higher. “Oh good, that’s a good one. Those boners get lots of use, so they store up massive amounts of magic.”

“That’s so Freudian, I barely know where to begin.”

“Then don’t bother. I’m writing these down, you know,” he informed me.

I had a split second of panic, trying to remember what I’d said. Quickly I retrieved the rattling bones and stuck the promised items aside, leaving whatever remained in the duffel bag for Elizabeth’s future use. I hoped I’d left her some good ones, but I had no way of knowing—and I briefly considered kicking myself for not asking her about them before I’d sent her on her way.

Nothing to be done about it now.

Horace was quiet, but not for long. “I wonder which ones she used.”

I told him the truth. “I have no idea.”

“You are useless to me,” he sulked.

“I love you too, dickhead.”

“Fuck off, darling. At least you got most of them.” Another diva sigh. “It’ll still be enough, one way or another.”

“Enough to what? Buy your own private island?”

“Don’t think it hasn’t occurred to me. But no, it ought to be enough to add a row of zeros to my bank account; that’s the goal here. Keep your eye on the prize, Ray.”

I shuddered to consider the sheer stores of wealth the greedy bastard must be hoarding like a dragon in a cave. “I’m glad I could be of service,” I told him. “How do you want to get these, anyway? I can’t remember what we decided.”

“If you drop those things into the mail, I will come to your house and kill you myself. Same goes for UPS or FedEx, I swear to God. You sit on them, and I’ll come get them. Or you can bring them out to me, whichever you like best—I don’t care.”

“Sit on them. Got it.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Of course I do. And I’ll keep them safe between now and such a time as you can get your sticky little paws on them, don’t worry.”

“Excellent. Where are you now?”

“Atlanta. It’s a long story. Don’t worry about it.”

“Ah!” he said happily. “That’s not too far at all. I can hop a flight tomorrow night, and pick them up from you then.”

“No.”

“Don’t tell me that,” he commanded.

“I’m here on business, Horace. Business of a different and personal nature. I won’t be around much, and I can’t promise you I’ll be available to nurture your every whim.”

“When you put it that way, it sounds unreasonable.”

“I’ll call you when I get back to Seattle, and we’ll work something out, okay?”

He hung up on me.

I shut the cell, then leaned back against the bed, suddenly so tired I could hardly see straight.

You think vampires don’t get jet lag? Think again. Just because the sun shuts us down doesn’t mean that the shifting time zones don’t screw with us big time. I’m not always ready to sleep when the sun comes up, particularly if I’ve been in the northern latitudes and I’m on a steady schedule. And then, naturally enough, I don’t always want to wake up as soon as the sun sets.

Not that it matters. When half your day is potentially fatal, you have to make hay while the sun shines. Or the opposite of that.

Adrian came back within half an hour. By then, I’d had a shower and dried my hair, and was mostly dressed. Usually it doesn’t take me even that long, but this was different. I was visiting the Barringtons, on behalf of a big important House, and I wanted to look more presentable than usual.

By which I don’t mean that I wander around looking like road-kill. In my opinion, I usually look awesome. Effortlessly so, if I do say so myself.

Yet somehow I felt confounded by the prospect of the Atlanta House. I’d heard a hundred years of stories about the place—how crazy it was, how dangerous it could be, and how easy it was to commit a grievous faux pas without realizing it.

Southern hospitality my ass.

Perhaps it isn’t fair for me to put it like that, because by all reports, the Barringtons aren’t local by origin. They’re carpetbaggers from Philadelphia—an offshoot of a House that had grown too big to govern. Or more to the point, it’d grown too big for everyone to successfully get along without a whole lot of murdering going on.

It happens like that, sometimes. A House gets so huge that it can’t sustain itself in peace, so a few of the more difficult family members are kicked out to start their own party. Or to take over someone else’s.

A hundred years ago, Atlanta was mostly rebuilt from Sherman’s firebug drive-by, but the vampire population hadn’t returned in force. Any serious diaspora is hard on the undead, since the patterns required for our survival can require weeks or months to establish with any real security. It took me years to carve out my little safe zone in Seattle, with all my attendant identities, bank accounts, and property holdings. I don’t know if it was harder or easier to get a setup established back before computers and telephones and security cameras, but it couldn’t have been easy to return and rebuild after a fire of that magnitude. Whoever had held the House before the war could hardly be blamed for abandoning the place in its wake.

Any survivors had surely started new communities elsewhere, or joined others. Organizing a move home was probably more trouble than it was worth.

Enter the Barringtons.

They came, they saw, they conquered the chaos with yet more chaos, and they were demented enough that no one ever challenged them on it. Their reputation was one of capriciousness and cunning, ruthlessness and violence.

But no one ever accused them of being dumb.

“You nervous?” Adrian asked me. He may as well have asked if I’d been to the beach lately.

“Yeah. Are you?”

“Yeah.”

I settled on black. Head-to-toe. It’s classic, it all matches, and it’s a power color. Seneschals used to wear white, back in ye olden days, but these weren’t those days and I didn’t have a stitch of white to my name anyway, with the possible exception of a crisp dress shirt or two.

“Dramatic,” Adrian observed. He was dressed like a dude. Dark jeans, gray sweater, and black motorcycle boots. Dudes always have it easy when it comes to wardrobe. So do ghouls, I guess—unless there was some dress code of which I was unaware. With the Barringtons, one never knew.

“Well,” I said when I was done.

“Well,” he said back.

“Let’s do this.”

He jingled the keys at me. Together we headed downstairs for the parking garage. The valet nabbed the car, and Adrian drove. Ghouls chauffeur.

I didn’t ride in the back, though. It would’ve felt too weird, so I sat beside him in the passenger’s seat, breathing deeply and steadily, like I was in labor. Anything to soothe my nerves, because my nerves were rubbing off on Adrian, and if both of us were nervous, we’d never get anywhere.

I closed my eyes as we headed out toward the Buckhead neighborhood.

In my brain, I replayed the voice-mail message to which I’d awakened, informing me that Elizabeth had arrived safely and was settling into her new accommodations. Ian and Domino had helped her into the floor immediately below our living quarters, since it was mostly finished and we were out of bedrooms in the main area. It was for the best. It’d give her some privacy, and it’d give them a buffer between our safe space and her episodes, should she have any before I got back.

She was already asking about the bones, wanting to know when she’d get the ones I’d promised she could keep. I tried not to fixate on that. I tried not to wonder if this had been a bad call, and if I shouldn’t have maybe put my foot down before Adrian had started buying plane tickets.

Oh wait. He did that while I was asleep.

Well, I was the idiot who’d agreed to it upon awakening. But if there was a piper to be paid, he’d have to take an IOU because one bad thing at a time. Just one. And Atlanta was pretty damn bad.

“Everything will be fine, you know,” I said out loud.

Adrian glanced at me. The streetlights cut bars of white and gold across his face as we drove, and he mustered a smile. “I’m sure you’re right.”

“The thing is, we have to stay cool.”

“I am all about staying cool.”

“Just remember that we have a right to be there, and we don’t even have any lies to remember—except that you’re a ghoul. Beyond that, this is on the up-and-up.”

“And except for how I’m going to look for Isabelle, or some trace of her. And you’re trying to prove that they’re horrible, deranged murderers.”

“And except for those things, yes. But there’s nothing on the books to keep you from asking around while you’re there—and no law or rule against it. As long as you remain discreet, and don’t get yourself into any trouble while we’re guests of their House—”

“I know, I know. And don’t worry. I won’t get myself killed.”

“It’s hard not to worry. If you do anything to get yourself killed, they’ll be after me right behind you.”

“It warms my heart to hear you express such concern for my well-being.”

“Nothing but love for ya, baby. And in all seriousness, maybe that’s the best way to think of it. We’re guests in their House, and that gives us both rights and obligations. Be a good guest, and we’ll be all right.”

“Stop worrying,” he ordered me.

“I can’t. It’s what I do.”

By the time we pulled up to the new-money mansion that served as Barrington headquarters, I was vibrating with tension.

“This is the place?” he asked dubiously.

The engine idled. We were sitting at a gate with a call box.

“This is the place,” I confirmed, my voice both drier and weaker than I would’ve liked.

And what a place it was. A McMansion in the most ridiculous sense, in a neighborhood full of them. Buckhead is the place where all the football and basketball players have their residences, and although some of the homes are older, most of them are circa 1990 or later, with all the design sense and charm of post-modern architecture, if one may be permitted to use a term loosely.

The Barrington mansion sprawled on a lawn perhaps two acres big, and surrounded by a stone fence that was maybe ten feet high, by my best guess. I could’ve predicted broken glass cemented into the top, since it’s less conspicuous than barbed wire and more difficult to simply clip one’s way past. Though it was nighttime, obviously, I could pick out that the mansion was painted the eggshell beige with white trim that seems to be the industry standard for such homes. It would probably be uncharitable to call the look “neoclassical Georgian plus IBM taupe and gingerbread revival meeting in a dark alley for fisticuffs and insults.” But there I go anyway.

It wasn’t my kind of joint. I shall leave it at that.

Suddenly I was glad we had a Lexus. If I’d showed up in one of my throwaway beaters, I would’ve felt ridiculous. Never mind that I can afford to buy something much nicer; that’s not the point. Inconspicuousness is the point, though I could assume it would be lost on the Barringtons.

But I had to admit, they fit in with the rest of the block.

Therefore, it may be that inconspicuousness is in the eye of the beholder … or in the zoning laws, as the case may be.

Adrian rolled down the window and leaned out to press the red call button. I tried to shake the idea that it was summoning dogs, or activating a trapdoor that would swallow us and the Lexus whole, but that was easier said than done. The place was a brick-and-mortar caricature of Mr. Burns’s mansion from The Simpsons.

A tinny voice came through the call box. “How can I help you?”

Adrian cleared his throat and said, “I have Raylene Pendle, seneschal from the San Francisco House. We’re expected.”

The box didn’t answer right away. When it did, the voice said, “Yes, please come inside. Follow the driveway up to the house, and then around back. You’ll find a small lot where you can park.”

Then the gates buzzed, but they didn’t swing slowly open like I’d expected. They retracted to the left and right of the entrance, coming to a stop behind the wall.

The smell of electricity wafted in through Adrian’s open window, and it wasn’t just the call box. Up on the stone walls, I could see cameras tracking our every move, and there were no doubt cameras I couldn’t see lurking in other spots. Either birds or bats flapped up and into the night as the gates rolled back into position.

My money was on bats. Little blingy ones, carrying tiny Louis Vuitton clutches.

Slowly Adrian drove us up the long, gently curving driveway that led up to the house and then around it. Much to my personal amusement, the path was lined with solar-powered lawn lights—one every few yards, on both sides. That had to count as irony in some universe, right?

Behind the house, the place was blessedly well lit from a vampiric standpoint. Lights were installed behind bushes and from overhangs, all of them diffuse enough to give the yard a glow without blinding anyone who pulled up to park. I could tell someone had put a lot of thought into it.

Like I said, crazy—not dumb.

The Lexus stopped in a logical place, alongside a BMW and another fucking Hummer, both of them so highly polished and meticulously detailed that they gleamed like ghosts. Adrian cut the engine and turned in the seat to face me.

“We can do this. And it will be fine.”

“What you said.”

He brandished the knuckles of his right hand, calling for a fist-bump. I gave him one and said, “Let’s go, ghoul.” And I prayed that he remembered Rule Number One above all.

Rule Number One: We aren’t friends.

And this sucked a lot, because I wanted nothing more than to approach this house with a really good friend to back me up. Even though I had one, the employer–employee façade was going to take the edge off my fragile feelings of security. But that’s the nature of the beast.

We exited the Lexus and closed our doors in sync, smacking the evening silence with one loud bang that made us both jump, even though we were the ones making the noise. But we pulled ourselves together, tossed each other the nod of a cohort, and made for the big back porch—where a large set of double doors with glass panes were illuminated by a helpful, handy-dandy spotlight … in case visitors had any questions about where they were expected to go.

“Me first,” I whispered without moving my lips. “Don’t forget.”

“I’m not,” he replied in kind.

Up the prettily cherry-stained deck steps I went, with him close behind, and before I could reach the doors to knock or search for a doorbell, a dark silhouette appeared on the other side of the glass. It was not a large shadow. It implied someone approximately my own size and shape. The lights from the house’s interior backlit this woman so that her features were all but indistinguishable until her hand was on the latch to let us inside.

The swaying open of that door on its hinges was no creaking of a cemetery gate, but it felt no less sinister for the smooth arc that opened the home.

Her hand remaining on the latch, the woman said, “Welcome to the Barrington House, Ms. Pendle. I am Sheriden.”

Sheriden was a pixie-faced frosted blonde in her thirties, wearing simple clothes but a diamond that could’ve choked a Doberman. I suppose marking one’s ghouls with tattoos is seen as tacky these days. Jewelry certainly has more holding power. I hear you can get rid of a tattoo, but it’d be tough to part with a rock like that.

“Hello, Sheriden.” I nodded politely. The one-name introduction and her obvious mortality told me she was probably the head ghoul of the household. So far as slaves went, it was a pretty good gig. Rather like being a high-end butler, but with more bodily fluids involved—unless being a butler is much weirder than it looks on Masterpiece Theatre. “I thank you for your welcome. I’ve brought an assistant, as you can see. This is Adrian, and he answers to me.”

“Excellent. Won’t you both come inside? The family has assembled to meet you in the main living area downstairs.”

Awesome, I thought. What I said was, “Certainly.”

Adrian didn’t say a word because no one had spoken to him. So far, so good.

Sheriden stood aside as we stepped into what looked like a rear parlor or some other kind of sitting room, and off to our right was a dining area. I mean, a regular people’s dining area. Vampires don’t need a hardwood table and seating for eight, but I suppose it’s nice to preserve the illusion.

Something unpleasant about this niggled around in the back of my head, and as Sheriden closed the door behind us, shutting us inside the Barrington compound proper, I remembered something.

Southerners don’t typically receive people at the back door.

And when they do, it’s considered an insult.