Chapter One #3
While Berky rolled the former attackers over and handcuffed them, I collected, deactivated, and replaced the amulets in my pockets. Except the amulet that been flung into the dark. The stasis working had a limited life-span and looked like ordinary gravel, so I wasn’t worried.
“You may a’ given all your magic secrets away, Baby Girl,” KeeKee said.
“I know,” I said, weariness settling on my shoulders like lead weights. “I know. But I wasn’t going to let them take Corry.”
“Fuck no. Fuck that shit and the horse they rode in on,” KeeKee said.
I barked a single note of startled laughter. It changed over to a belly laugh, as KeeKee’s car glided to us on auto and the doors opened. She slid behind the wheel.
“A little help here?” I asked Berky, smothering my chuckles. “Corry’s out cold.”
“I gotchur girl,” he said, opening the Scorpio’s passenger door and gently easing Corry out, carrying her like a sleeping child.
Lissa climbed in back of KeeKee’s vehicle and held out her arms for her friend. “I’ll take her, Berkley.”
Berky stopped, still as a vamp. “How’d you know my name?”
Lissa smiled, sweet as a summer breeze. “I know a lot about you. Maybe we could, you know, get a cup of coffee one day. Put Corry right here.” Lissa patted the seat and her own lap.
Berky looked as if he’d been poleaxed. But he was tender as a mama bear with a cub as he placed Corry on the back seat, her head and upper body in Lissa’s arms.
“This is where you say, ‘I’d love that, Lissa,’ ” KeeKee said.
“I’d love that, Lissa,” Berky repeated as I climbed into the passenger seat.
“My number’s on file with the club. Call me,” Lissa said.
“You white dudes are dumb as shit,” KeeKee said.
The doors closed. We moved silently into the night. Behind me I knew the cams had come back on. Baby brother would make sure.
EJ
He replayed the security system’s footage on his own dedicated unit.
With the assistance of Ojos, our security AI, he cut out or damaged anything that would identify his sister, her friends, and everything that happened after Angie’s disruptor at Kegs and Boots.
When Angie and Walter were nearly home, and before the cops would demand to see the camera footage of the fight in the parking lot, EJ reinstalled the altered footage from the Kegs.
He wired Berkley funds he considered adequate to keep the bouncer happy, sent him a short text that said, Tell the police it looks like a gang fight and some people got away.
The necessities done, EJ followed the progress of KeeKee’s vehicle until everyone was dropped off, including his sister. She stopped in the office downstairs, and EJ left his apartment, taking the elevator down to greet her.
When he got to the office, she was depositing something into her desk drawer, where she kept most of her business amulets. She unstrapped her unused vamp-killer from her thigh and hung it, in its sheath, on the desk leg.
She didn’t look at him, didn’t speak, while they walked together to the elevator.
When they got in and the doors closed, his sister dropped her green glamour and leaned her forehead against a reflective wall. Her reddish hair was snarled, her face pale as snow.
“Ange?” he asked, using her teenage nickname.
Her breath fogging the metal of the elevator wall, she said, “Yeah.”
“That was…quite the…interaction in the parking lot. You need to talk?”
She huffed a short laugh. “Interaction. Right. Tomorrow, little brother. We can debrief. I’m tapped out.”
“Rest, Ange,” he said.
He held the elevator door open, watching her until she closed the door to her apartment.
Back in his own apartment, a floor above hers, he replayed the Kegs and Boots’s security footage, the unaltered version, on his wall screen.
He marked several places, which he sent to Walter for the bodyguard’s perspective, but nothing jumped out at him except the utter stupidity of it all.
The drugging, kidnapping, and fight left him with more questions than answers.
He watched Tony walk Corry, drugged and laughing, out of the bar and shove her into his Scorpion Mag. Corry was shorter than Angie, but in the dark, she could pass as his sister.
It had been a long time since anyone tried to collect on Angie’s bounty.
The Dark Queen had made certain that few were willing to consider harming her godchild, by making the counterbounty five times richer than the one on Angie.
So why had six guys, Tony, and the fanghead lead singer of Kegs and Boots’s house band gone after Angie?
Or was Corry herself really the one in danger? Covering all the bases, EJ initiated a financial and social media search on Angie’s friend. Just in case.
Choosing a different cam from earlier in the evening, one inside of Kegs, he watched Labaka try to pick up Angie, all ingratiating greasy vamp charm, which no longer worked on his sister. EJ clipped a still shot of Labaka at the bar and placed it beside one from the parking area.
A very different expression was on the vamp’s face when Walter confronted him.
Confusion. Bewilderment. As if he didn’t recognize Walter, didn’t expect the Mithran vampire to appear.
Labaka would have known about Walter had he done the tiniest bit of research on Angie.
Was he dumb enough to think that Baby was all she was?
Was he even part of the attacking group?
The others in the parking lot had known who Walter was. They had been expecting him. Yet, they used lead rounds, not silver. So, maybe expecting a bodyguard, but not a vamp bodyguard?
Or hell. Maybe they had been expecting EJ.
He watched the entire encounter over and over. They moved like postwar military. Yeah. Maybe they wanted him, after all. But the number of people who had read his classified military sleeve and might want to talk to him about it, was in the single digits.
Something was off.
With any luck, Walter would uncover it, but EJ wouldn’t hear back before dawn, when their blood-sucking bodyguard would fall asleep.
EJ had no idea where the man took his detainees when he had to extract information, so there was no way to go there and…
discuss things…with the attackers himself. Instead, he had to wait until dusk.
EJ petted George, his Basset Hound, and absently sponged away a trail of slobber. He adored the dog, but slobber was not allowed on his sofa. Sipping a glass of red wine, he let things filter through his mind. He kept coming back to the same useless conclusion. Something was off.
The Firm had a prospective client interview in the morning. Angie and he needed work because they needed money. He didn’t know if it was a good thing or a bad one that a new puzzle would take his mind off the night’s events.