Chapter 30 #2
But that is what it would remain—an idea—at least until they dealt with the real reason they were here. And that was to finish what they’d started.
Well, what Sylvia had started. Aster had sort of been following the plan with the loose haziness that a toddler follows the rules of a board game.
“So Yasmine’s our in?” Aster asked as she unpacked her backpack.
She pulled out a green corduroy suit, a vintage one with buttons made of ox bone. Sylvia had told her to bring something nice to wear. The Council had a dress code.
“Ha,” Sylvia laughed dryly. She was leaning against the bed and looking at Aster’s suit with an unreadable expression. “No. She’s completely useless.”
Aster rolled her eyes. “Except for the fact that she wired you hundreds of thousands of dollars. Despite the fact that we killed her son-in-law.”
“Please. She couldn’t stand Richard’s misogynist spawn anymore than she could stand Richard.
And to the money, as I said, useless,” Sylvia muttered, then threw herself back onto the bed, spreading her arms like a starfish.
“A woman needs at least a million these days to buy real estate. Anyway. Our man on the inside is actually your intern. Willy?”
“...Wallace?” Also not her intern, but.
“Yeah, sure.” Sylvia sat back up and reached for her purse. Inside was a stack of Icelandic króna, a glasses case, and a few folded documents. She snapped open the glasses case and haphazardly shoved the narrow-frame spectacles onto her face, and unfurled the paper.
Oh my god she looks so adorable in those.
Aster’s heart could hardly handle it. She’d forgotten about Sylvia’s farsightedness.
Probably because Sylvia refused to acknowledge it, and instead did all her computer work with her face pressed so close to the laptop screen that her nose repeatedly smudged the webcam.
Sylvia turned the document around so Aster could see it. She pointed to a line that had been underlined in red ink, her long, black fingernail tapping it impatiently. It was an address to a street in some Icelandic town Aster had no idea how to pronounce.
“Remember when Tim—Wallace—whatever— came over to our place and dumbly spread all of his step-brother’s confidential company documents on our table?”
Aster nodded, clearing her throat. “Sure.”
“And how he told us about how Tommy was inflating the bottomline of his failed company using a web of overseas investors?”
“Vaguely.” In truth, Aster hadn’t been listening at all. But she did remember Sylvia inspecting the documents very intently when Wallace had brought them over.
“Well, I hired some Romanian hacker off Fiverr to do some digging for me,” Sylvia said, then crumpled the paper into a ball, and threw it over her shoulder into a waste bin—perfectly dunking it without even looking behind her.
“I gave him the names of the companies Tommy was working with, and he came back with the profiles of the board members for each of them. Of course all these Council guys operate under fake names, so I had him cross-reference the companies with each other, until he figured out which faces and addresses kept reappearing across the different company websites across the globe. Low and behold.”
She laid the last piece of paper out on the bed.
It was the board for a company called International Human Management, based in Reykjavik, Iceland.
Listed on the colorful print-out were six friendly but stern faces.
Aster didn’t recognize any of them until she blinked at the last one, a man named Anthony Black.
Her brain itched at a memory. One that had scabbed over.
“I recognize this guy from somewhere.”
“Really? That’s impressive. I wouldn’t expect you to, given that you were on the verge of passing out during our little meet-and-greet. That’s Richard Ashcroft. Tommy’s daddy. Yasmine’s ex. Oil billionaire. Our guy. He’s on the board under a false name.”
Aster looked up at her, and Sylvia was grinning wolfishly.
Aster could tell she was impressed with herself.
Sylvia had always enjoyed playing detective. She’d even done a stint of it in the twentieth century, when they were particularly bored and not overly broke. It didn’t last long, though—being a cop is kind of an incongruent profession for a serial cop-killer.
“International Human Management is a pretty hammer-to-the-nail name for a company which is in the business of enthralling the world’s population, but hey.
I can appreciate a blunt instrument,” she said, winking at Aster and mouthing like you.
Aster immediately blushed. This idiot. The idiot in question continued, “Tommy had an email account at their company courtesy of Papa, so I just used the password we got from Wallace to log in to it, and got access to their full calendar, and…” She batted her eyelashes.
“Voila, guess who’s attending a company party tomorrow at seven in the beautiful Icelandic countryside? ”
She reached over into Aster’s backpack, plucked her fake passport from its pouch, and then smacked it lightly on Aster’s chest, looking deeply, confidently into her eyes as she did it.
“Aster Valdez and Selene Wilkstone are.”
Sylvia giggled, waiting eagerly for Aster’s applause. When she didn’t receive it, she frowned, tossing the passport aside and pouting.
“What?” she drawled, like a chastised child.
“Sylvia.”
“What?”
“Are you serious?” Aster groaned.
“Deadly,” Sylvia huffed, affronted. “Do you not like my plan?”
“No, I mean. I love your plan. I just want to confirm the fact that there is no plan.”
Sylvia’s eyebrows screwed together. “Of course there’s a plan.”
“Right. So let me just go through the details of that plan, then, if you don’t mind.”
Sylvia threw her hands up and nodded.
Aster blew out a long breath. “The Council has no idea we’re coming.”
“Correct.”
“Tomorrow at seven, we’re going to barge in on their party. The party of the most powerful vampires—and most wealthy thralls—in the whole world, all gathered in one place, doing who knows what.”
“Yep,” Sylvia said, crossing her arms and popping the p.
“And you’re going to—what exactly—effortlessly charm your way into getting Doctor Vey to work on your brain and get rid of whatever you’ve got going on?”
“Precisely. It’s the most efficient way to get what I want. I could wait around and try to figure out where he lives, track him down, and threaten his wife and children, or something equally boring, but this plan gives me an excuse to dress up. And book us a hotel room with a bath. So.”
Aster laughed. And laughed, until she wasn’t laughing anymore, and then she was just shaking her head in stupid adoration. Because she loved this woman. And the truth was, she wouldn’t want it any other way. She picked Sylvia because of her chaos, not in spite of it.
From what Sylvia had repeatedly told her, Aster was the most deadly vampire on the planet. A nice compliment, sure, but she always enjoyed an opportunity to test that conclusion.
“Okay, Sylvia. We’ll do it your way.”
Sylvia grinned.
“I knew you’d come around.”
“I always do,” Aster mumbled. Then lowered her voice to a whisper, “For you.”
Sylvia’s arrogance melted then, her wolf-grin turning into something softer, less self-assured.
Avoiding Aster’s eyes, she tilted her head towards the ground, and studied the cedar floorboards.
It was almost stunning to Aster how someone who was so larger than life could become so small within seconds, could shrivel in fear when faced with adoration instead of skepticism.
“In case this goes horribly, catastrophically wrong, which by all accounts it probably will,” Sylvia admitted quietly, with a hoarse laugh. “I need to. For the life of me, I need to…”
Trailing off, she looked up at Aster again, and this time none of that cockiness was there.
There was a plain, honest need to communicate. Like an inmate standing behind a sheet of glass and wishing they could climb through to the other side. Just desperation.
A desperation that made her grab Aster by the back of the neck, pull her forward, and press their lips together softly.
So softly, without any pretense—no talk of biting, or biology, or memories—that it was as if they did it all the time, like it was simple and effortless.
Like it happened everyday. Aster’s heart clenched in a way it never had before. She felt like crying.
It was a kiss that felt like being in love.
“Don’t do something stupid like die on me tomorrow,” Sylvia whispered against her lips, and Aster felt tears sting her cheeks. “I’ll hate you forever if you do.”
“That wouldn’t be the worst thing,” Aster laughed into the kiss, because she found she couldn’t do anything else. She grabbed the lapels of Sylvia’s blouse and clenched her fingers around them. She needed an anchor. “Hatred and love are very close cousins.”
Sylvia’s lips froze against hers, and a few moments later, she pulled away.
Aster couldn’t even blame her.
She knew it was the fear.
The fear that made it so she didn’t meet Aster’s eyes when their lips disconnected, that made her rush to the bathroom with some paltry excuse.
The fear that made it so they ate room service side-by-side, not touching.
The fear that made it so they didn’t cuddle at night, even when they both wanted to touch like the moon wants the sun, caught in an inevitable, un-intersecting orbit.
But there was something between them that was more powerful than inertia, and Aster knew it; she knew it because in the dead of night, when the stars were blinking over the water, Sylvia curled into her side, wrapped herself around Aster’s stomach, and mumbled almost incoherently,
“I’m so glad you found me.”