Charming (15 page)

Sig grinned briefly, then refocused. “So if we’re right, there was a power struggle, and Ellison either killed the smart vampire and its friends in the hive, or the smart vampire figured out that Ellison was going to get them all destroyed sooner or later and ran away with a couple of vampires that it convinced to go along.”

“Right,” I said. “Which is why Ellison started screwing up and hunting easy prey locally as soon as he was making decisions on his own again. The vampire who had been acting as his safety brake was gone.”

Choo leveled an index finger at me. “What you mean is, you killed the dumbass vampires who were making sloppy mistakes, and now there might be a smart one on the loose who’s going to be a lot harder to catch.”

“You’re welcome,” I said sourly.

A grin flashed across his face, bitter, brief, and unrepentant.

“It makes sense that the smart vampire was a woman.” Sig’s voice was reflective.

Choo snorted.

“Is that some kind of sexist statement?” I asked her.

Sig scowled at us. “Any vampire is strong enough to do its own digging, but this one let the dumb males do a bad job of it instead. I’ll bet we’re looking at a vampire who got in the habit of letting men do the physical work in its previous life. Maybe she was used to hanging around men who were bigger and dumber than she was and letting them think they were in charge.”

“I still think you’re being sexist,” Choo said teasingly. “You’re not a sexist pig. You’re a sexist Sig.”

I smiled slightly.

Sig turned on Choo and got up in his face a little, poking his chest with her index finger. “Tell me this, Mr. Exterminator. Do you know why people who know what they’re talking about call vampire groups
hives
?”

“I just figured it was because they were dangerous to kick over,” he said warily. From the way he was rubbing his chest, that index finger had left a bruise.

Sig shook her head. “It’s because the biggest and most powerful groups are almost always ruled by queens.”

Choo’s mouth opened before he realized that he didn’t have anything to say.

“Either way,” I said, tapping the screen in front of me. “I don’t like where this smart vampire’s mind was going.”

Sig came up closer and put her hand on my shoulder as she leaned down to look at the computer screen again. Her breath was warm on the side of my face and smelled like peppermint. “What do you see?”

I shifted in my seat awkwardly and pointed at some of the terms on the query list. “Blood transfusion? Blood restoration rate? Why would you have to worry about transfusions or how often somebody can donate blood if you’re just going to kill them and drain their carcass?”

Sig’s hand tightened on my shoulder. It wasn’t painful, but I could tell that she really was stronger than I was. Vampire strong.

“Aw hell,” Choo whispered, seeing it. Maybe exterminators are used to thinking in terms of parasites.

The vampire was thinking of keeping people alive as a constant food source. This has been done before, obviously, but usually vampires with more experience use their glamours to seduce people into becoming walking blood banks for them willingly, often with a promise of eventual immortality. The vampires get someone to pay their bills and guard them during the day this way as well, and there’s much less risk of discovery involved. Plus, it’s one of the options for gathering blood that is tolerated by knights. It sucks (literally) for whoever gets chosen to play Renfield to the vampire’s Dracula, but the Pax isn’t about enforcing morality; it’s about ensuring discretion. And let’s face it, humans willingly subjugate themselves to others all the time: to pimps, parents, drugs, abusive partners, asshole employers, deadbeat lovers, children, peer groups, etc.

Either way, based on what we’d seen, I suspected that this hive was thinking more in terms of taking and keeping prisoners. They had all the transfusion equipment they needed built
into their gums; they wouldn’t be investigating other means of blood withdrawal and storage unless they were interested in setting up their own personal blood bank.

“This smart female vampire we’re talking about,” I mused. “If she exists, she’s a nasty piece of work even as vampires go.”

Choo snorted a no-kidding-genius kind of a snort.

“I’m just saying,” I said. “Anybody smart enough to come up with this operation is smart enough to figure out easier ways to feed. When you get right down to it, all a vampire has to do is take a little blood from a hard-to-spot place and hypnotize someone into forgetting it ever happened. There’s no need to do all this when they’ve got Craigslist and online dating services.”

“That’s true,” Sig agreed. “Vampires are narcissists and sociopaths. Even the smartest ones usually use their brains to figure out the route of most pleasure with least effort.”

“This one either has a lot of hostility,” I said, “or has ambitions we don’t know about. Why does she need so much blood?”

Sig snapped out her cell phone and hit a button on her speed dial. “Stanislav!” Sig said, straightening up and taking her hand off my shoulder. “We need you.”

My sharper-than-average ears heard him ask if she was in trouble, and the van door was already opening in the background.

“No,” said Sig impatiently. “We have a computer that needs coaxing.”

He hung up.

“Click on that e-mail site,” she said, turning back to me and pointing at an icon in the top window.

I obliged. “It could be Steve Ellison’s e-mail service,” I reminded her.

“That’s why we need Stanislav,” she informed me. “Sometimes he can tap into the psychic impressions left behind by a
person, and his hands will automatically type the same passwords and names that the person did when they were sitting in the same place on the same computer. Sometimes he can type out entire e-mails.”

I made an appreciative grunt. “What about that tech guy you gave the cell phone to…”

I trailed off as Dvornik stormed into the house. I stood up and made room for him at the computer, and somehow he still managed to shove past and shoulder-check me as he came into the room and sat down. It was a weak shoulder check, though. His face was haggard and pale as he looked at the screen truculently.

“What do you…” He paused and coughed a feeble cough that turned into a violent series of hacking ones, his shoulders shaking. The guy really did not look well. “What do you need now?”

“We need some of your magic,” Sig informed him, kneading his shoulders. His spine eased under her touch, and his attitude seemed to thaw slightly. “Can you get into that e-mail account, or have you spread yourself too thin already?”

Dvornik eyed me balefully, clearly wishing that Sig hadn’t asked him that question in front of me. If Sig honestly didn’t want him to overtax himself, she clearly didn’t understand male psychology.

Dvornik grunted, then slowly, hesitantly, put his fingers over the keyboard without touching any of the keys. We all stayed quiet. I could hear his breath go shallow and even, then his heartbeat. His body took on the pose of a master pianist poised over his instrument. Suddenly his fingers plunged down onto the keyboard, pulled by some magnetic current. His back arched, sharp cracks popping from his spine as if he were a log on a fire. A gargle escaped from him and he bit down on his
tongue so violently that blood leaked from both corners of his mouth. His head thrashed back and forth and his shoulders hunched and unhunched.

From the way Sig and Choo were cursing, this wasn’t standard operating procedure. Finally Stanislav’s eyes rolled up in their sockets and he collapsed.

Sig yelled his name and dropped down to her knees on the floor next to him.

I hate show-offs.

12

I
was back behind the bar at Rigby’s at ten o clock that night. I was planning on ditching my Trevor Barnes identity soon, but the slight possibility that vampires might come check out the place where their former hive mates had died had kept me from quitting right away. It was Friday, which meant that Dave insisted on tending bar with me although it wasn’t that much busier than a Thursday. I think he just wanted to have somewhere to go on the opening night of the weekend, and someone to go there with. Dave was a sixty-eight-year-old widower, a bland-faced man with a midsize potbelly. He had gray hair and a gray life, and I think the main reason he bought a bar when he retired was that he wanted to be colorful. That sounds harsh, and I’m not trying to be mean. I like Dave.

There were five guys and three young ladies at the round table—the only circular table in the place—who were getting a little rowdy. It was nothing mean-spirited; in the absence of a live band and in the presence of a jukebox that played country-western songs, they had decided to make their own entertainment. Basically, they were just having an animated
conversation, and every time someone said something toast-worthy, one person would repeat it, shouting it out, and then they would all laugh and shout whatever it was and clap and drink. So far they were being amusing and livening up the joint; in another three or four rounds we’d see.

This time it was Ted Cahill who walked into the bar and all up in my business. He was alone, and he seemed a little bemused as he looked around, probably wondering if he’d wandered into a Cracker Barrel by mistake. He still had on the same jacket he’d worn that morning. It looked kind of stupid with the collared pink fabric shirt and dungarees, but it did the same barely adequate job of hiding his gun.

I indicated the spot at the bar where Sig had sat the night before. Cahill nodded and made his way over there.

“That guy’s a friend of mine,” I told Dave. “Is it OK if I talk to him for a minute?”

Dave surveyed the crowd doubtfully. I only call it a crowd to be polite, by the way. Dave, though, was an optimist. To him, the bar was half full.

“He’s a cop,” I said. “They hang around pubs a lot. If he likes it here, maybe he’ll bring some friends along next time.”

I was pushing Dave’s buttons for all I was worth—hell, I’d even remembered to call the place a pub. “Sure,” he said, magnanimous in retreat. “Talking to the customers is part of your job.”

“You hear that?” Tracy said to me. Tracy was a honey blonde who was sitting at the bar and celebrating being fired from a manager’s position at Dollar Mart. She had nice eyes and full breasts that hadn’t started to sag and full hips that had started to thicken. Her skin was unwrinkled but looked like it might crack from excess makeup and time spent in a tanning booth.

“Come back soon,” Tracy called after me as I moved down the bar.

Cahill greeted me warmly. “I get my drinks free, right?”

“Huh,” I said. “I guess you really are a cop.”

“One of Clayburg’s finest,” he agreed, settling on the stool with practiced ease. “Give me a draft.”

I obliged, and he watched skeptically as I drew him a beer. He seemed to have a hard time believing that I really was a bartender. I didn’t take it personally. I had the same problem myself. I watched as he took a sip.

“Shouldn’t you be polishing something?” he demanded.

“I am,” I said. “My manners. That’s why I haven’t told you where to put that free drink yet, you pushy bastard.”

He laughed and removed a wad of folded-up papers from inside his jacket and tossed them onto the bar in front of me. “Go ahead,” Cahill said. “It’s the juvie file of that other vampire who was using Ellison’s computer. Parth couldn’t get a real name off her e-mail registration, but I got a print that wasn’t Steve Ellison’s off the computer keyboard and came up with this.”

Parth was an Indian name. Was this “Parth” Sig’s mysterious tech guy or a cop that Cahill worked with?

I unfolded the photocopied papers slowly. A picture of a young girl with pronounced cheekbones, frizzy brown hair, and dead eyes was in the top left corner of the first one.

“Your mystery vampire is a seventeen-year-old high school dropout,” Cahill said quietly. “Her name is Anne Marie Padgett. She went missing in Tennessee a year ago.”

I was scanning the pages. “Not for the first time, apparently.”

Cahill snorted. “No. Her biological mother’s a drug addict serving time for another year and a half, and her biological father is anybody’s guess. Anne Marie was taken away from Mom when she was eight. Since then she’s spent as much time in the juvenile detention system as she has in foster care.”