Chapter 24 – Luna #2
“Am I right?” I pressed.
“In a Schrodingarian sense. Vampires are a little like cockroaches with fangs; they can withstand a lot.”
He pulled us into a diner’s parking lot and I got out, trying to pretend I wasn’t with him, even as he held the plate glass door open up for me. I ducked in, made sure the waitress gave us the backmost table, and kept her there so we could order quickly.
When that was through, I stared at him until he continued. “We do think he’s alive, yes.”
“Where!” I quietly hissed.
“That’s the question. Near as we can figure, they zipped through a dimensional gate,” he said, and the waitress returned with our coffees.
“Probably not to hell,” he went on, like that was a real thing.
Then again, given what he was, I felt like I didn’t know shit anymore.
“Just somewhere. But it took both of them. Your Jack, and our Sam.”
“Why her?”
“Because she’ll be tasty?” he said with a painful wince, then jerked his chin at me. “Be honest—how long do you think he can hold out?”
“Isn’t she like an expert magic user?” I’d seen her levitate things before.
Nilesh held up his two hands evenly. “Sam against a normal vampire, any day.” Then he hoisted his right hand high and his left hand low. “Sam against a starving vampire with his back against the wall, potentially possessed by a primordial evil entity?”
“Possessed?” I said with a gasp.
“Potentially,” he corrected me, and I frowned.
“So you do know what took him! That thing they went to go look at—in Rosalie’s mine!”
“Yes. In hindsight, sending them both out there to investigate was probably the worst decision we’ve made in a long while. That’s probably when it got the idea to steal her, as well as him. Although it’d already started stalking Jack—through you.”
I blinked. “Wha—?” I started, with every intention of defending myself. I was smart, I was cruel—I was a regular little Rosalie. Then our plates came, and instead of fighting, I started scarfing down real food—because if Jesus’s BFF here was buying, I was eating every crumb.
“We searched Vermillion, after the leadership change,” Nilesh said, starting in on his own plate of poached eggs and home fries, far more slowly. “And when we couldn’t find it, we figured Maya’d been an idiot and sold it.”
“You’re telling me you just sent a Faithful trapsing on in there?” I asked around a mouthful of gravy covered biscuit.
“They were already there.”
I almost let the food fall from my mouth. “You . . . have a mole inside Vermillion?”
“Three. We’ll cycle two out though—Maya’s strong, but she’s not currently a player. She’s a little too petty. Lacks vision.”
I was absolutely going to throw that in Maya’s face, if I ever saw her again. “How do they stay pure in there?” I tried to ask without laughing. The only reason Vermillion wasn’t a wretched hive of scum and villainy was because the janitorial crew was well paid.
“There’s a lot more of us degraded types like myself than you might think. People who want to suffer for the cause. Or they’ve already done things and are looking to repent.”
“And you think my side’s kinky,” I muttered, and he snorted.
“Why’d you take it in the first place?”
“It told me to.” I dabbed a napkin at my face and tried to regain some feminine wiles. “The second after Rosalie died, the thing started whispering to me. I gave it some blood, and we were off to the races.” I frowned. “What was it?”
“A piece of baleen, for filter feeding, only instead of krill, when it has a form, it absorbs blood and sorrow.” He put his hands out in front of his face and clamped his fingers back and forth like the Predator’s lower jaws. “It has a lot of them.”
I swallowed. “What does the rest of it look like?”
“Kind of insectile. Why do you ask?”
“Because . . . we did things,” I confessed with reluctance.
“And before you judge me, you were kind of present for some of them. Like, say, a half-angel, half-very-bad-thing DP.” I walked my fingers out on the table as I talked, rather than dare looking up.
“That’s why I had to leave your place. It was with us. ”
“And I didn’t know?” He sounded bewildered.
“Yeah.” I shrugged one shoulder. I wasn’t happy that I’d apparently had sex with some sort of psychic bug-type creature. If I’d wanted to fuck a Pokémon, I would have, I don’t know, gone onto Second Life.
“Mind control,” Nilesh muttered. “That’s new.”
I frowned. “It wasn’t like you weren’t willing. Me either, for that matter.”
He ignored me. “Or, if it was there, it was mostly incorporeal—except for where it chose to apply pressure—” His voice drifted, talking to himself as he thought, and it was unfortunately attractive.
For all of Rosalie’s many, many other flaws, she was smart, and I’d loved to watch her think.
“That’s hugely powerful, and even more dangerous, Luna,” he said, resurfacing, seeming unsettled, before refocusing on me.
“If even I didn’t know it was there . . .
all things considered, you’re lucky to’ve gotten out alive. ”
“It was talking to Paco, too.” Nilesh’s eyebrows rose and I continued. “Telling him Jack didn’t love him—or how now that he was dead, they wouldn’t last.”
Nilesh made a thoughtful sound. “Preying on fears for sustenance, or encouraging isolation?”
I considered both options. “The latter, I think.” And that meant Paco’d been lucky, too.
If he hadn’t taken my Master’s voice at face value, so to speak, the only thing that would’ve made Jack more reckless than Paco’s denial would have been losing the man entirely.
“Because it wouldn’t let Jack turn me. He offered, and it made me refuse him. ”
He nodded, and tucked back into his breakfast with intent, like he needed to finish it quickly. “So it could keep you weak enough to use you to lure him out there—and who knows what it promised the Rojo. Did they tell you anything?”
“Not really. But you know how they are.” Then I remembered the other woman. “What about the one you rescued?”
“Same,” he answered. I thought back to how I’d found her, and gave him a look. “Don’t worry. We’ll repatriate her to humanity.”
“Doesn’t that sound like fun.”
I watched him run a piece of toast around to catch the last bits of his eggs. “We could do that for you, too, you know. Or, even better yet, you could stop worrying about your cred and come work for my team.”
I gave him a face like I’d just sucked on a lemon. “I’m not entertaining it, but—how would that even go?”
“Well, first I give you a website URL and a login, and you watch about ten hours of instructional videos. It’s like ‘How To Be Good’ driver’s ed.”
I put a hand to my mouth to stop from laughing. “You’re really selling it.”
“You think I’m joking?” A genuine smile cracked his face, and suddenly it felt like I was back at that diner the other night with him, when I hadn’t known who he was.
He waved the waitress over for the check, grinning.
“I keep telling them they need to move into the twenty-first century, and at least do a Zoom call, but no one listens.” He waggled his eyebrows at me. “Tempted?”
“Not in the least,” I said with a head shake. He gave the waitress a credit card without looking at the bill. “All I want to be right now is free.” And I realized as I said it, it was true. “Even if it does kill me.”
“The Huntington’s. Yeah,” he said. He was distracted when she returned, so he didn’t see me gawking, feeling blindsided—but after he’d tipped well and quickly signed he looked up.
“If there’s one thing the Faithful are good at, it’s snooping through records,” he said.
“So I get why you fell in with them, starting with Rosalie. But what if I told you there was another way?”
My eyebrows crept up my forehead. “Church? God and all that? Online curriculum?” I snorted.
“I’ve done the kind of stuff you don’t go and get forgiven for, Nilesh, no matter what it says in your little book.
And what’s more is—I don’t want to be.” I knew it even more than I knew I wanted my freedom.
“I’ll sit with who I am. I’ve made peace with that, even if some things I’ve done were shitty.
But I don’t want to belong to anyone, ever again. I just want to be me.”
Nilesh’s eyes considered me, and for a moment, I saw exactly what he was inside of them—I felt the longitude of his age and the latitude of his denied divinity—and then he looked away, to begin writing on his receipt.
“Well, Luna, who is now a free agent in her own life,” he said, before handing it over with a number scrawled on it. “Call me if you hear anything.”
My phone had been in Jack’s car when it crashed; who knew when I’d be able to get that number back again. “And how will you call me?” I asked, as he stood up and scooted his chair politely back under the table.
“Don’t worry. If I need to, I’ll find you. We’re obnoxiously good at that, too.”