Chapter 8
Aster had taken down five policemen, two waiters, ten members of kitchen staff, and one unlucky hostess named Barbara by the time Sylvia was done dismantling the security cameras.
They’d done this so many times that they didn’t even have to talk about it.
Which was good, because Aster was positive whatever would come out of her mouth next would be an incoherent jumble of desperate sounds.
She was not prepared to speak to Sylvia after what she’d just experienced.
And neither was Sylvia, apparently—they entered a mutually agreeable pact of silence as they slung the bodies into chairs, and served a plate of Lobster Clam Inversion in front of each corpse.
They then took the elevator down, and pointedly stared at the floor the whole time. A small eternity passed by the time the metal doors groaned open.
“We should—” Sylvia started.
“—Go back to work so it’s not suspicious?”
Sylvia gave her a small, awkward smile.
“Good to know your brain’s still working.”
Aster laughed hollowly.
Not so sure about that.
***
“How was lunch?”
For the first time since she started at VioCroft, Aster was grateful to hear Wallace’s voice.
She settled down in her creaky office chair and gave him a tired smile. It didn’t quite reach her eyes—but it wasn’t like she’d ever smiled at him anyway, so why would he know the difference?
“Meh,” she answered. “The food was terrible.”
Wallace pushed out of his cubicle and yawned. “I bet. Tommy has the worst taste. He’s so obsessed with meat that’s stuffed in another meat. It’s disgusting.”
Aster had begun typing uselessly at her laptop, but that response made her fingers still.
She turned to him slowly, trying to remain as chill as humanly possible.
“You mean the CEO?”
He squinted at her in confusion. “Er, yeah? Is that not who you went to lunch with?”
“Why would I be going out to lunch with the CEO? Do I seem like an employee of importance?” Wallace laughed at that, which Aster considered a success. “Me and Sylvia—Selene went to the taco place down the street. Don Juan’s?”
“Really? Because I could have sworn I saw you two penciled into his calendar.”
Aster blinked. Don’t panic. Do not panic.
Wait.
She shot him a genuinely bewildered look.
“You have access to the CEO’s calendar? Isn’t that like, private?”
“To most people, sure. But I had the unfortunate privilege of growing up in the same house as him, so,” Wallace groaned. “I’ve been trying to find a time in his calendar for us to drive up and see Mom for a few days. But he’s always busy with something.”
Mom.
Mom.
They’re brothers.
Oh, for the love of fuck.
It took everything within Aster to not react.
Thankfully, Sylvia had spent the last six hundred years testing her patience, and the last week and a half training her willpower.
“So.” Aster had to confirm it— “Your dad is like, Richard Ashcroft? The oil dude?”
Wallace avoided her gaze. He picked up a chewed-on pencil from his desk and began toying with it, balancing it on his knuckles.
“The oil dude, indeed,” he repeated mockingly. “And he’s my step-dad. My real dad’s dead. Richard is just a rich shithead.”
“I… see.”
So, Wallace did not seem fond of his step-father.
Or his brother.
Maybe she and him had more in common than she once thought.
Of course, friendship seemed a little… off the table… now that she’d just killed his step-brother. But hey, it was a brief and lovely hypothetical.
Aster leaned over into his cubicle, propping her elbow up on his desk. She flashed a mischievous smile at him—and her eyes glowed red.
“Hey, I have a fun idea. Why don’t you show me his calendar?”
***
“His fucking brother?”
“Nepotism, dude. It’s a sickness.”
The irony of Aster calling Sylvia dude after she’d nearly sucked the life out of her five hours earlier was not lost on her. But that didn’t mean she was going to acknowledge it.
The 10 PM news was blaring from their tiny television. Aster could see the reflection of the screen dancing across Sylvia’s face—a video of medics carrying bodies out on stretchers.
“The victim has yet to be identified, but the restaurant’s reservation records indicate that the John Doe might be Tommy Ashcroft, son of Richard Ashcroft and former CEO of VioCroft Labs.”
Sylvia turned to her. They were on the couch, per usual, but this time, not touching.
No footsie, no casual leg draped over casual leg.
Nothing. Several stacks of food sat between them: two pizza boxes, hot wings, potato chips.
Anything to help them observe the five foot rule that they’d silently created and were now mutually reinforcing.
“But your Suggestion worked on the little shrimp?” Sylvia asked.
She sounded a mix between impressed and concerned. Aster felt the same way about it.
She shrugged. “His eyes were red the whole time. Anyway, turns out he actually had Tommy’s passwords saved and everything—a serious security hazard—so I wrote them down.
” Aster dug into her pocket and produced her company phone, a shiny little green iPhone.
“I logged into Tommy’s account on my phone and edited the calendar event to remove us from the invite.
Now it just looks like he went there alone, if anyone thinks to check it. ”
Sylvia’s eyebrows were halfway off her face by the time Aster was done talking. The other vampire huffed out a disbelieving laugh, then shook her head.
“What?” Aster mumbled, feeling self conscious.
Sylvia leaned over their mountain of takeout and punched Aster lightly in the shoulder.
“Look at you, tech support,” she teased, poking out her tongue. “Maybe we forget this whole plan and go get you a job at the Apple Genius Bar.”
Aster rolled her eyes, blushing.
“I don’t even know what that is,” she muttered, looking away.
“It’s a bunch of nerds sitting in a store that looks like a spaceship.
” Sylvia waved her hand dismissively. “I stole my last phone from the one down in Brooklyn. There is seriously nothing more fun than watching one of those dweebs pile a bunch of two-thousand-dollar devices into a Walmart shopping bag you handed him. He didn’t even twitch when the alarm started blazing. ”
Aster grinned fondly at the idea of it. While she and Sylvia did most of their risky business together—kind of like how women bring their giant Dobermans with them when they go on midnight runs—sometimes Sylvia insisted she needed to let her hair down and handle something herself.
Crimes of persuasion were the easiest for her in that respect; she could get people to fess up for things they didn’t do while Sylvia walked out the back entrance, heels clicking.
The TV news switched cameras away from the paramedics, back to the mainstage.
“Breaking news. After a careful autopsy, the body has been identified as VioCroft CEO Tommy Ashcroft. Richard Ashcroft will reportedly be landing in New York City tonight to prepare for his son’s funeral.
The procession will take place just outside the city.
His former wife, Yasmine Sokolov, professor of Physics at SUNY Albany, has also made a statement that she will be arriving in the city tomorrow evening. ”
“Holy shit.”
Sylvia nearly fell off the couch in excitement. She scrambled up to the TV screen, as if getting closer to the monitor would somehow reveal information they couldn’t see from three feet away. Aster nearly called her an old lady for it—but Sylvia beat her to it, spinning around.
“Plan’s still on, baby.” Sylvia grinned as wide as the sun. “We’re crashing a funeral.”
Aster groaned. This woman has zero boundaries.
“We can’t crash a fucking—”
Goosebumps ran across Aster’s arms as she processed the full sentence.
Plan’s still on, baby. She knew Sylvia was just throwing the pet name around like usual—she’d called Aster everything under the sun for comedic effect—but she still couldn’t expunge the memory of earlier today from her mind.
They’d been doing a pretty solid job so far of not discussing or acknowledging it whatsoever, but that single word took her back in an instant.
She remembered how sweet Sylvia’s blood had tasted, and squirmed slightly in her seat, face flushing.
“Crash a fucking funeral?” Sylvia finished for her, not noticing the change in her face. She was too consumed by whatever brilliant idea she’d just thought up. “Oh, we so are.”
She turned the TV off, pushed the coffee table to the side, and squatted by Aster’s legs. She put her hands on either of Aster’s thighs, grinning up at her.
“We should go shopping,” Sylvia said, giddy. She began to itch her fingers into the fabric of Aster’s pants as she talked. “I haven’t been to a good funeral in years. And you just know this one is going to have the best catering. Fucking rich people. God, you got to love ‘em.”
Aster’s throat bobbed as Sylvia’s nails scratched along her leg.
“Sylvia…”
The other vampire ignored her, continuing to think out loud.
“But how are we going to get in? Maybe you can fudge the calendar again—” She frowned.
“No, we can’t have their dead son inviting us to his own funeral.
Bad optics. Eh, I’m sure we can just Suggest the security detail.
Or worst case, if someone tries to throw us out, we’ll just yell at Wallace to let us in.
That kid has pretty much sworn fealty to you anyway.
” Sylvia paused, laughed. “You think he has a crush?”
At that, Aster rolled her eyes. She clamped her hands down on Sylvia’s so they would stop their infernal ministrations.
“He’s definitely gay. I’m actually a little concerned for you that you didn’t clock that.”
“Ohhh. That explains why his hair is so shiny.”
A laugh exploded out of Aster. “Sylvia, what the fuck does that have to do with anything?”
Sylvia shrugged, then slowly rose to her feet again. “Gay people have shiny hair.”