Chapter 4
Four
The club music seemed to pulse against Claire’s invisible earplugs, specially made for vampires.
Without them, she’d be on the floor, probably unconscious from the unbearable volume.
With them, she was uncomfortable but functional.
She hopped onto a barstool and ordered a virgin margarita that looked just like the traditional kind.
Over the next hour, she loosened her movements and increased the volume of her voice by calculated degrees.
She listened to every conversation in the building, in the lot outside, in the cars outside.
She waited to be noticed, approached. She looked like an easy target.
The men in the bar had three choices. Ignore her, treat her like a person, or try to harm her.
Saturday nights were for justice.
Specifically, the second and fourth Saturdays of the month.
Maybe it wasn’t enough, but she’d had to draw a few lines for herself, around herself, back when she’d first devised this mission.
Without them, things had gotten blurry; tonight they were perfectly clear.
Solid lines between herself and her persona, as solid as her dramatically thick black eyeliner.
She’d been there, soaked in sensory stimulation and chatting with a few random guys who moved on shortly, for about three hours when she wondered if this was going to be a neutral night.
Maybe when she left, she’d be alone. But statistics so far hinted she might get a hit tonight.
It tended to happen every fourth or fifth mission, and the last four had yielded neutral results.
Sure enough, when she headed to the restroom—looking tipsy but careful not to over-exaggerate—one of the men seated along the bar slid off his stool to follow her at what he must think was an unnoticeable distance.
He smelled like sweat and beer, and Claire moved just slowly enough not to lose him in the press of dancing bodies.
She went into the restroom and waited just a minute.
He didn’t come in. She checked her reflection out of a long habit that helped her remain in character when she was about to dangle herself as bait on a hook.
Her long blonde wig remained perfectly in place, and her brown contacts hid her identity better than anything else could.
She tugged at the hot-pink fringe dress that helped make her conspicuous.
Stared another moment at the makeup that made her nearly unrecognizable to herself—cat eyes and lime green eyeshadow, lipstick to match her dress.
This wasn’t Claire Elisabeth Vanderlaan. This was Verena the Vigilant.
And yeah, maybe naming her persona something that sounded like she belonged in the latest superhero blockbuster was laughable. But it worked. It reminded her the powerlessness she had to put on was absolutely false.
She double-checked the silver daisy pin at the neck of her dress. It looked vaguely out of place with this ensemble, but only vaguely. She nodded to the brown-eyed blonde, and Verena nodded back from the mirror.
“Let’s do this,” she said.
She lowered her shoulders, hunched her head slightly forward, lowered her eyelids just a bit, let her purse fall down her arm, and stepped out of the restroom.
The man had waited for her, of course, leaning against the wall between restroom doors with typical overconfidence.
He was noticeably bigger than she was, around six feet tall and built like a guy who had a gym membership and showed up for more than half his scheduled days.
His brown hair was buzzed short, and his eyes were brown too.
He filled out his jeans and beige V-neck tee in ways that might have been interesting to another woman.
A woman who didn’t get distracted almost daily by images of a lean vampire with metallic eyes arcing his body in a clean dive off a boulder.
“Hey, baby,” the guy said as he pushed off the wall.
Claire didn’t allow herself to roll her eyes. Instead she cheesed a huge grin at him, and he had just enough beer in his system to think she meant it.
“Do you know you’re the best-looking woman in here?”
“Am I?” She bounced the tresses of the wig with a shimmy of her shoulders.
“You know what, honey, I think we should go somewhere.”
Ooh. A fast mover. Claire squinted at him as if she didn’t have eyesight five times sharper than a human’s 20/20, plenty sharp enough to watch his pupils dilate in the dim corridor as he looked her up and down. She said, “Have we met before?”
“Totally possible, if not in this life then maybe a past one. That might explain our connection, right? I felt it as soon as I laid eyes on you.”
For crying out loud, why did they all have the same script?
“I’m Max. And you are?”
“Verena,” she said.
His forehead crinkled for a fleeting moment of thought, then smoothed out as beer and his baser nature took over again. “Cool name.”
“I think so too.” Germanic for protector, or so had claimed a baby-name book at the bookstore downtown.
“So, Verena, want to get out of here?”
“Where would we go?”
“I’m here on business from out of town. My hotel’s really close, and the room’s really nice.”
Her scalp prickled, but no sign of her rage showed. She knew this from long practice, long attunement to her body. Her expression was still clueless. Her stance was still relaxed. “Maybe we could get out of the noise, at least. But nothing…well, you know. Nothing too far, okay?”
“Of course not,” he said. “Only what you want.”
“We could just talk, and…maybe a little more? But if that sounds boring, we might not have a connection like you thought.”
He drew a cross over his heart. “No worries, baby. Talking sounds great to me too.”
“Let’s go then. It’s pretty loud in here.”
She made sure to stumble exactly once on the way to his car, which had a Virginia license plate and didn’t in any way resemble a rental. He wasn’t lying about the proximity, though. In five minutes, he pulled into the lot of the closest hotel.
Tonight was for justice.
Max’s human vision hadn’t even seen her as she flipped him face-down on the bed and zip tied his hands, then his feet. He’d tried to fight back without the slightest chance. Claire left him on the bed and walked a few paces away from it. One more down.
He lifted his face from the bedspread to stare at her. “You’re not drunk.”
“Good catch,” she said.
“And you’re not human.”
“Two for two.”
Claire walked to the far end of the room and unzipped her purse.
First, of course, she tugged on her gray knit gloves.
Then she withdrew a slightly creased manila envelope from her purse.
She unpinned her daisy, keeping the lens pointed at the floor as she pressed her thumb to the left side of the stem to end recording.
Then she pressed the right side, and the tiny memory card popped out into her hand.
She slid the memory card into the envelope.
Max was silent while she searched the pockets of his jeans and freed his wallet. She opened the flap and performed a speculative head tilt at his driver’s license picture.
“I thought you might be a Maxwell or a Maximilian, but you’re just Max.”
He said nothing.
Claire slid his wallet into the envelope to join the memory card and held it, flap up, toward the zip-tied man. “Okay, Max Forton. Lick the seal.”
“Excuse me?”
Such a polite would-be criminal offender. “Do it.”
“Why should I?”
“What did you say a few minutes ago when I said very clearly and loudly, ‘my answer is no’?”
He stared her down some more.
“You said, ‘my answer is yes,’ because you thought you were the strongest person in this room. But you’re not, are you?”
He wasn’t going to respond, but she didn’t need him to because she didn’t care.
“I’m the strongest person in this room, Max. So now based on your ethical code, it’s my yes that counts, and I’m saying yes to your licking this seal.”
His entire six-foot frame shook, a normal human response to being overcome and restrained by a vampire.
It could be adrenaline or fear, but from Max, it wasn’t.
This was fury. He wasn’t stammering or even sneering.
He simply continued to stare at her, his eyes flat.
He wanted to hurt her right now. He really, really wanted it.
“Lick the seal,” Claire said. “Or I’ll bite you, and then I’ll drain you.”
“No, you won’t. It’s against your ethical code.”
She put her hands on her hips and stared him down. “Based on our interactions so far, does that seem relevant to me?”
He didn’t blink. His expression didn’t change. He might guess she was bluffing, but he was too smart to chance that she wasn’t. He ran his tongue over the envelope seal, and Claire pressed down the flap.
“Good boy,” she said.
She turned her back, because she could. He couldn’t move a finger without her hearing it, and she wanted him to know he’d finally met a woman who could take him down without even trying.
Unlike most of her captures, Max didn’t call her obscene names.
Max didn’t try to bribe her into letting him go.
He didn’t try to convince her he’d never done anything like this before and would never try it again.
He simply lay on his stomach, head raised at an angle that had to be straining his neck, and watched her set aside the manila envelope on the TV stand.
He didn’t fight when she lifted him by his bound wrists and, one-handed, carried him to the bathroom.
She dropped him to the floor, and without a way to catch himself, he landed on one hip and one shoulder on the cold white tile. He didn’t make a sound.
He was still watching her when she locked the door from the inside. She stepped out and shut it, wishing it opened into the room so she could shove the desk chair under the knob. Just in case. It wasn’t something she usually worried about, but…
This one was worse. Her gut knew, and her gut was never wrong. She crossed the room and fetched her phone from her purse.
“Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?”
“I’d like to report an attempted assault.”
“Against yourself or someone else?”
“Me,” she said. “But I’m fine. He didn’t get very far.”
“Okay, can you tell me where you are and what happened?”
“The hotel across the street from Fang Nightclub. He thought I was intoxicated, and I played along until he got me to room 107. That’s where he is now. I’ve got him zip-tied, hands and feet. He’ll be locked in the bathroom when your officer gets here.”
“I’m sorry, you said you played along?”
“He knew exactly what he was doing,” she said.
“Obviously planned this out. I’m leaving a manila envelope for you on the TV stand.
I was wearing a body cam, and the footage is on the memory card.
I made him lick the seal, so they can get DNA off that if they can’t get a warrant for it otherwise. I think this guy is a repeat offender.”
The dispatcher was silent. Then quietly she said, “Would you happen to be…?”
“A vampire? Yeah, it’s me.”
“Oh. And can I ask your name?”
Claire laughed. Couldn’t blame them for trying. “You can ask. Now I’m out of here. Thanks for all you do.”
“Ma’am, please wait for the officers to show up so you can give them a statement.”
“This call is my statement. Have a great night.”
She hung up. Drew a deep breath, let it out, and darted from the room.
As she called for an Uber back to Fang Nightclub, a strange pang passed through her chest. If someone knew…
if anyone knew…she could call a friend. She could talk through the rage of knowing what he’d planned to do to her from the moment he saw her.
She could talk through the bone-deep satisfaction of justice, the worry that he’d escape consequences as so many predators did.
But how was she supposed to explain to her friends that she’d spent a small fortune over the last year on memory cards for a body cam she’d modified from a thrift-store pin? Claire Vanderlaan would never wear that cheesy pin, but Verena the Vigilant judged jewelry by utility, not aesthetic.
She gave her driver an address a block over from the hotel, just to be safe.
Even if a cop spotted her, with her brown eyes and modified posture she wouldn’t stand out to them as a vampire.
She removed her four-inch wedges and began to run barefoot down the sidewalk.
She maintained a pace that humans wouldn’t see, all the way to her pickup spot.
The motion helped. By the time she stopped moving, her anger and restlessness had shaken off in the wake of ultimate speed.
So had her wig, which she stuffed into her purse halfway there.
When she got home, she would remove the contacts, scrub the makeup, wash the vestiges of wig glue from the skin at her hairline. She would shower a good long time. She would curl up on her couch wrapped in blankets, watch a few episodes of one crime drama or another. And she would be Claire again.
But as she slid into the back seat of her driver’s beige sedan and wrinkled her nose at the scent of cheap air freshener, her melancholy remained. If she could only call a friend.
She pushed the feelings away. She was a strong, independent woman, and Saturday nights were not for friends. Saturday nights were for justice.