Bloodshot (36 page)

“Where’d you move here from?”

“I haven’t moved here from anywhere. Just visiting. Saw your flyer. Thought I’d check this out on my free night. It was either this or wander around on the lawn with a map of the big white monuments, trying to tell the difference and deciding whether or not to care.”

He grunted like a man from a tourist town who’d already seen all the tourist bits himself. “Okay. Welcome, then.”

Standing so close like that, almost right up against me in a fashion that might be considered harassment under different circumstances, he was a whole goddamn cluster of laser beams, projecting his intentions like a searchlight on a river. He’d locked on to me, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t like his welcome. I didn’t want it. And suddenly I didn’t want to be anywhere near him, and I considered bolting on the spot except that a flash of panic kept me standing there, not quite touching this guy and not quite running away.

“Thanks,” I said. My mouth was dry. His was predatory. I lowered my voice, thinking it might be best to barrel forward, rather than play patty-cake politics until he could rouse the cavalry and have me carted off. So I said, “Maybe we could take a moment to talk in private, eh, Lieutenant?”

“Why would we do that?” Ah. Not stupid. Not wanting to be alone with me, even though a casual observer might’ve assumed that was all he wanted. The body language is not so different, when you watch it from afar.

“Because I want to ask you some questions. And you want to ask me some, too, or maybe you don’t want to ask me anything. Maybe you just want to get the hell away from me and get on with your Cub Scout activities.”

“You’re quite a—”

I turned to face him full-on, letting him get a good and nasty look at my too-black eyes and my too-white skin with the fragile blue veins crawling spider-like beneath it. I wasn’t wearing any
makeup and that, too, had been deliberate. “Look buddy,” I growled, still keeping it quiet. “I know about your program, and I know what you’re doing here, rounding up these assholes for reconnaissance.” I used Major Bruner’s word. The one that gave me the shakes if I thought about it too hard.

“You don’t know
dick,
” he argued.

Trying to lure him now, trying to draw him outside, I turned my back to him halfway and began to ooze toward the rearward door where the back stairs appeared to be. “Dick? Oh, I know him. But I think his name is actually Bruner,” I sneered, keeping close watch on his face as I retreated.

“Boss?” somebody said. One of the young grunts, the parkour acolytes.

“Not now!” he hissed, reaching out to take me by the arm.

I moved it out of his grasp fast enough to make his eyebrows shoot skyward. And still it looked like I hadn’t moved at all. Catlike, I lingered a step beyond him, but I did not run. “We should talk,” I told him.

And I practically slithered toward the stairs.

He shuffled behind me, too heavy and loud for a man who taught a class on how to sneak around and run away, but maybe he was just that nervous. He was young after all, and maybe he’d heard lots about my kind but hadn’t encountered many of us.

Or, as I considered with scorn, it might be that he’d only ever encountered us while we were restrained, or blinded, or crippled, or dead. The very thought made me want to turn around and rip his head off but I didn’t, not yet. Self-restraint is not one of my chief virtues, but self-preservation is—and I still had my uncertainties to anchor me to nonviolence.

We slipped together into the stairwell and let the door ease shut behind us. It was dark in there, and would’ve been romantic or, like, totally hot under different circumstances. He started to
talk, but I wasn’t listening yet. I was looking upstairs and downstairs, and opening my psychic sense to feel around for other people in either direction. I was wondering about the bare lightbulbs screwed into the wall fixtures at the platforms where the stairs leveled, and turned.

“What are you doing here—what are you
really
doing here? I know what you are, yes, if that’s what you want to know. I know, and I’m not going to sit here and bring you along on one of these game nights, just to have you toy with the kids who—”

I caught up to his rambling and chose this point to interrupt. “Toy?” I blurted. “You accuse me of planning to toy with your Boy Scouts? A fine attitude, you motherfucker, given what you’ve been known to do to
my
breed.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Project Bloodshot, and Major Bruner and his sick Nazi experiments.”

He paled. “Bloodshot’s a closed program,” he insisted.

“That’s what I heard, but that’s not what I’m seeing. Bruner’s still at it, and you’re in it with him.”

“No. You have no idea!”

“Then what’s this for? These junior paramilitary enthusiasts? Don’t try to tell me you’re not using them for recon; don’t lie to me and say that this is some stupid extracurricular activity. You’re sending them after us, using them as disposable pawns to track down safe spots and homes, and then raid them and turn them inside out.”

“No one said they were disposable,” he objected. I couldn’t gauge his sincerity. He was too rattled by being so close to me, which told me I was probably a novelty. A known novelty, but a novelty all the same.

“You send them into facilities that are owned and maintained by vampires, unarmed,” I added, remembering Trevor’s utter lack
of defensive weaponry. “If you don’t expect them to get killed, you’re stupider than you look.”

“Fuck you,” he said, resorting to that last argument of vice presidents.

“I know you’re working with Bruner,” I added. “I know he’s been using parkour clubs like this to scout, and I know he recommends this one in particular.”

“Then what do you want?” he asked, hands in the air in a shrug that might’ve been reaching for a weapon for all I could see. I had an image in mind of Bruce Willis in
Die Hard
, with the guns duct-taped to his back (see? A thousand and one uses). So rather than take any Hollywood-inspired chances I kicked him backward against the stairs, hard enough to take his breath away and keep it away for a few seconds.

I used this interlude to stand over him. “I want to know what it’ll take to close the program. For good this time.”

“You’re … out of … your mind,” he wheezed, clutching at his chest.

I jammed my foot down on top of his fingers, pressing harder against the place where I’d kicked, and where I suspected a rib or two had cracked, and must surely be jabbing against his lungs. He grimaced and grabbed at my calf, trying to force me off. If I gave him time, he’d do it. I’m crazy strong but I don’t weigh much, and he probably had me beat by eighty pounds.

I said, “His funding was pulled years ago, and he’s retired. So he’s gone civilian. Using mercenaries and someone else’s money.”

“Is that what you think?”

“Yeah, that’s what I think.” I jerked backward, clipping his jaw with the toe of my boot as I retreated. “And I’m not alone. Not like you are,” I said, trying to make it menacing and cruel.

“Oh yeah, that’s me. Lone gunman, grassy knoll. You already know it’s Bruner’s pet project. So go after him, for fuck’s sake!”

He was getting scared, and I liked it. I could also smell a little blood. Maybe he’d bitten his tongue? “But Bruner isn’t acting alone. Someone’s signing his checks.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” he said, and the words came out with a whistle. His right hand was sneaking toward his boot, so I kicked that, too—and a flash of metal flicked out of his hand to clatter on the stairs below.

“Pathetic,” I said. “Big man like you, trying to take a tiny vamp like me. Cheating, and still not getting anywhere. That ought to tell you something, dickwad. It ought to give you some idea of what we’re capable of—and if it scares you, well, it ought to. You know what?” I blathered on, oblivious to the events on the other side of the door, whatever they were. “I’m not even the oldest or strongest of my kind. Not by a long shot. I’m just the little lady who twigged to your schemes first. I’ve already pulled a few friends onto this … onto this
case,
” I called it the only thing that fit. “And we’re going to put a stop to it. All of it.”

“And how do you think you’re going to do that? You can’t just delete a few files, kill a few people, and it’ll all be over!”

I knew that already, so I asked: “Where’s the money coming from, then?” Because shutting off the money was the one surefire way to shut down the program—and that was the one big puzzle piece I was missing.

“Private backer. Nobody knows who he is.”

“Give me something I can work with,” I ordered, “and I might let you walk out of here in one piece.”

“All I do is … I just herd the volunteers, that’s all.”

“Kids like these, I get it. And just a few minutes ago you were telling me how they weren’t disposable.”

He shook his head. “Most of these kids never go near anything interesting. Only the A-grade gets recommended up the food chain. That’s all I do. Send them up the food chain.”

“Fine choice of words,” I said.

“You know what I mean!”

“Yeah, I know what you mean.” And it didn’t make him a choirboy, even if I thought he was telling the whole truth, and I didn’t.

While I stood there deciding what else to ask, if anything, he wanted to know, “Then what about me?” He was wobbly, trying to sit up. I thought I heard something scrape and slide—definitely a rib.

“What about you? Oh, darling,” I said with a purr, having concluded that really, there was no way out for Mr. Bolton. Not now. Not unless I wanted him to go running to his boss and let the whole world know I was in town ahead of schedule. “You’re going to give Bruner a message for me. That’s what you’re going to do.”

“A message?”

“That’s right.” I reached back quickly to the spot on the stairs where the knife had fallen. It was a good one, gator-edged and curved. Probably a climber’s knife, made to slice through bungee cables and ropes. I didn’t want it. But I picked it up anyway, and I chucked it hard up at the nearest gleaming yellow bulb, smashing it with a clatter and plunging the stairwell into total darkness.

In a flash I turned to the stairwell door and found the sliding bolt I’d spotted as we’d exited. I slipped it into the locked position and then I turned to Lieutenant Bolton, who was attempting a backward scramble up, as if it’d take him away from me.

And then I fell on him, shoving his head to the side and baring his neck for optimum heavy nibbling. Yes, I remembered what I’d told Cal about nobody getting bitten, but come on.

I’m a big fat liar.

C
al swore under his breath, copiously and repeatedly, all the way back from the parkour meeting. He knew what I’d done. He wasn’t psychic or anything; I’d told him, quietly, right before we made a hasty exit back to the rental car and out of the neighborhood.

“You
said
you weren’t going to bite anybody.”

“I wasn’t
planning
to.” But I’d been leaving it on the table because sometimes you just have to play these things by ear. Sometimes you get a good eyeful of a man-sized action figure—and he knows what you are, and what you can do … and you know what he is, and what he’s done before, or what he’s helping other people do. And you just can’t stand it because for all his bluster and bullshit he’s weak and horrible, and cowardly, and if he caught you, he’d do terrible things to you—the kinds of things that were done to Ian and Isabelle.

Adrian wouldn’t have any pissy moral qualms about what I’d done. Ian probably wouldn’t, either.

“I can’t believe you’re being such a bitch about this,” I said to Cal, whose lips were jammed together in a grouch-face scowl.

“I don’t care that he’s dead. I don’t even care that you killed him,” he insisted, lips still drawn tighter than a clothesline. “I care that you deliberately endangered yourself—and me, let’s not forget
me
—after all your careful planning, and all your … all your crazy, self-righteous talk about being prepared for anything!”

“Who’s self-righteous?” I demanded. I’d own up to crazy any day of the week, but self-righteous I was prepared to fight.

“
You
—you act like you’ve got everything under control, like nothing that happens will surprise or inconvenience you, and everything is covered all the time because you’ve made all these preparations. These
crazy
fucking preparations. Did you even use anything at all in that bag of yours?”

“No, but I might use some of it later.” And I almost certainly would, once I got rid of this crybaby and picked up my drag queen.

His nostrils flared but he kept his eyes on the road. Deliberately, I assumed. Not wanting to look at me. “We were only supposed to be there looking around. And you didn’t
just
look around. You didn’t
just
ask questions. You could’ve gotten us both rounded up and … and
wrangled.
”

Wrangled. Stupid word.

“Wrangled, mangled. Lots of things could’ve happened, but didn’t. And yes, I said I was there to look around, and hey—I looked around. I came to some conclusions and acted on new information. You know what, Cal? That’s called
flexibility
. You’re one rigid son of a bitch, and someday it’ll get you killed.”

“I’m more careful than you are.”

“You’re …?” I was flabbergasted. “Do you seriously want to play
Who’s More Careful
with me? Because I’ll wipe the floor with
you, junior. I’ve been around longer than your great-grandparents and I’ve had plenty of time to become the carefulest person you’ll ever meet!”

He shook his head, eyes still locked on the road, to the traffic light and to the rear bumper of the car in front of us. “I’m more careful. Ian’s more careful. Lots of people are more careful than you. You’re reckless as hell, but you’re lucky. That’s all.”

“Fuck you,” I said.

“No, you know what? I take that back. You’re
not
lucky. You
are
prepared, just like you like to go on and on and on about. Your ridiculous plans for things that never happen, okay—it’s your coping mechanism, I get that. And it’s a damn good thing you have it. Otherwise you’d have never made it to thirty behaving the way you do. Sometimes, I guess, you save your own ass. But you’re always the one putting your own ass in danger first. And I don’t want to be any part of it.” His nostrils rippled and billowed like peep-show curtains. “And I don’t like Ian being any part of it.”