Falling from the Light (The Night Runner Series Book 3) (10 page)

“I guess if your name’s on something, you can decree whatever you want.” Maybe Old Man Goya had left that attitude behind, in a scientist or malicious executive. Except that, while Radia hurt vampires, it had the potential to harm more humans. Anti-vampire should equal pro-human, unless Goya’s regime simply hated everybody. A skin serum seemed like a slow and indirect way to make the world burn.

“Sure, except it’s stupid. That v-b – vampire blood – stuff is a wonder. I use Goya shit ’cause I get it at cost, but look at this.” She pulled back the collar of her shirt. An angry red rash stared at me. I grimaced.

“I get this every summer. Some kind of heat allergy. Goya’s lotion takes three weeks to work. My sister-in-law gave me a v-b tincture one time. Gone within hours. Company’s stupid not to try to get in on that. Anyway, you got an hour to eat.”

As if I had an appetite left.

L
unch was found
in a bright dining room decorated in primary colors and doing its best to pretend it was a franchised box restaurant. Slouching over my taco salad and chocolate sundae, I texted Mickey to see what was up. A happy smiley popped up immediately. I dug a corn chip through the whipped cream and popped it into my mouth. A minute passed. More chips, some accidental vegetables, more ice cream.

Since we were between the lunch rush and the dinner crowd, the place was mostly empty. A sullen dude with a goatee chopped fruit at the bar and a kid with his eyes locked on a mounted screen ran his push broom back and forth over the same stretch of carpet. My bodyguard and I were the only diners. I’d confronted him in the parking lot, mostly to make sure he hadn’t died of heat stroke while waiting, and he’d confessed his name was Derrick. He sat a few rows back eating something green and probably fat free. He’d also downed about a gallon of water since we’d arrived. My phone vibrated.

The hotel is abuzz—Thurston says abuzz is a word—about the feeders. Remember that boy from the pool, with the abs and the diving? He went out with friends and a vampire solicited him. Nobody knows her. Vampires are not allowed in Arizona except by special visa, and on a few of the reservations. They believe she’s a part of this gang of rugby vampires…

Renegade vampires. Not rugby. That was the phone.

But they would be good at rugby. Vampires are so strong.

I smiled at Mickey’s tangent. I’d never really had someone that I could chat with like this. My recent friends had been fellow runners, and they turned over and burned out so fast that I’d started withholding from them. It was nice, having a friend.

…this gang of renegade vampires who came from Quebec and Scandinavia. They were thrown out for trying to live among humans. So they ran away. This is very romantic, don’t you think? Running for their existence and having to live in a scary world.

There was nothing romantic about suckers who didn’t follow the rules. They could live in human cities, but they couldn’t cohabitate. Vampire makers and masters enforced discipline, and without that vampires tended to lose control. It was one of the things that set Mal apart. His maker was gone and, while Bronson directed him, he was rarely under his direct control. His special talent had something to do with that, his ability to suppress his power.

Maybe I should take Mickey to a hotel after all. Her delight at all things vampire was reaching a disturbing level. Sighing, I texted back to ask how Thurston was doing. I’d taken a moment to remind him that I wanted Mickey looked after before I left, feeling ten kinds of nervous because he could tear my head off if he wanted to. Instead he’d appeared offended that I’d thought I had to mention it.

We had a late breakfast together. I had a yogurt parfait and he had a giant thermos of blood. SO VAMPIRE. We’re looking at travel guides. He is interested in so many places. It’s like he never imagined he’d be allowed to travel. Also Malcolm stopped by. He was sad you were not here.

I told Mickey I’d be back in a couple hours and tucked my phone into my bag. Mal had come looking for me. That was a good thing. We’d both been in a temper when we parted ways. Life was too short to walk around angry.

He was done with Bronson in two years, which meant no more restrictions and no more punishment. That thought should have been a relief, but instead it sobered me. In the casino at Tenth World, it was like he didn’t have a care in the world. He was playful, even as he worked the other players. Twenty years he’d been tied to the master vampire, because he’d embarrassed the guy once. One single time. Even if Bronson forgot about him most of the time, large portions of that sentence must have been hell. Simply knowing that he had to watch his every step had to be a kind of torture. What would Malcolm do when he was free?

And would freedom to do all the things he’d been denied become more interesting than me?

I dumped my tray and went to wash my hands. The lights in the bathroom weren’t flattering, but I didn’t look half-bad. In fact, I looked better than I had a few years ago. My skin was smoother, the deep frown lines I’d had between my eyebrows since high school were gone. My lips never chapped. The knee I’d busted up snowboarding didn’t get stiff anymore, and the bone I’d broken in Chile barely even ached. And it wasn’t because I was drinking eight glasses of water a day or getting bee pollen facials. The feeders around the pool, other than the recent cuts and bites they’d hidden under pristine little bandages, had been beautiful. Some of it was genetics, but the radiance—there was nothing natural or human about that.

I’d probably have a few years until time overwhelmed ambient vampire energy and dragged my body down. Until I didn’t “compare favorably” anymore. A few years was enough time for me to grow to need Malcolm, to get attached in a way I couldn’t shake. Hell, maybe I didn’t even need a few years to get to that point.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the door ease open. I turned, knees bending, hand dropping into my bag. Derrick peeked in. I straightened.

“What the hell, perv?”

He cleared his throat, glanced behind him, then swung the door wide as if that would make hovering on the cusp of the ladies’ room less weird.

“Checking on you. You’ve been in here for fifteen minutes.”

“I had to freshen up. You know, wash the grease off and calibrate my feminine emotions.”

“You’re working in a warehouse and drink gas station coffee. Not the girliest chick out there.”

“Thank you for the assessment.” I headed toward him. “I’m stopping at the convenience store on the way back. Want me to grab you some water?”

He stiffened. He wasn’t tall, but the dude was ripped and screamed former military. Ramrod posture. Thick chest, trim waist. A patch of scars crisscrossed his left temple and cut gray lines into his black hair. He smelled faintly of sweat and aftershave.

“I’m fine, ma’am.”

“That’s great,
sir
. But I don’t want to have to slow down so that you can keep up after you spend the afternoon dehydrating in your old-lady Buick.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Stubborn, more like. How was your salad?”

“Abominable.”

“Mine, too.”

The afternoon passed in a blur of dusty boredom. I tried to be vigilant, taking a couple of stretch breaks to case the warehouse, trying to find something I could give Bronson. A truck showed up, was loaded, and left. Another truck arrived and was emptied. Rinse and repeat. The wind kicked up, making the overhead fans shudder.

“Clock out,” Lil rasped as I practiced giving myself whiplash by nodding off at the little desk. “Go to the other building and get your badge. From here on out, you ain’t here by six, you’re done.”

“Fair enough.” I popped the last video out of the machine and closed the case.

“You’ll be riding along with Hernandez on deliveries tomorrow.”

Hernandez, who had been doing as little work as possible all day, cringed upon hearing his name.

“You’re showing Andrea the ropes,” Lil yelled at him. His shoulders drooped as he sidestepped behind a crate. “He don’t talk much, but at least he’s lazy as shit.”

“Nice that he’s got something going for him.”

“That’s funny.” She didn’t laugh. “Now get out of here so’s I can lock her down.”

I walked to the other building, a decision I regretted ten steps in. I was panting by the time I reached the main building, sweat running down my back and pooling in unfortunate areas.

“Is it awful out there?” the receptionist asked, looking perky and crisp. My lip curled.

“It’d be considered a nice day in hell, probably.”

The security guard laughed at me as I dragged myself into the elevator. The bastard, so smug in his air-conditioned corner. The HR lady with the gray helmet of hair pretended she didn’t remember me, but she did commiserate over the heat as she slapped a grainy digital image of me onto the desk.

“It’s so nice to be legitimate,” I said, shoving it into the badge holder. “So, Lil says I need to start work at six, not nine.”

She glanced at her computer. It was running updates, in the process of shutting down. She rubbed the side of her nose as she stared at the screen and I could all but see her making the decision not to wait for it to start up again. She grabbed a sticky note and a pink pen.

“We can’t change that until the next pay cycle, but I’ll make a note of it right here.”

As if I’d be around for the next pay cycle. “Great.”

“You seeing this?” someone called from the office across the hall. I leaned back in my chair to see around the corner, then nearly fell over. A massive cloud covered the horizon, and not the distant horizon, but the near horizon.

“What is that?” I asked as we joined him in his office, blinking as though that would clear the sight.

“Dust storm.” Helmethead sighed. “I’d better call my sister to pick up my daughter. Last time, I couldn’t get to her for two hours and she told her teacher that I’d probably killed my husband and been arrested.”

Jesus. “How old is she?”

“Seven. Kids.” She smiled whimsically as she stuck her phone to her ear and went back to her office.

The dust storm rose up from the ground and blotted out the sun. It looked like a wall, a moving wall consuming everything in its path. Had I seen that when I’d left the warehouse I would have jumped in the car and headed for high country, or wherever you went to get away from such a thing.

“Are these common?” I asked. The clerk shook his head.

“A few times a summer. Usually there’s thunder and lightning, but that part of the storm must be somewhere else. Don’t try to drive in it. Better to settle in and let it sweep past. It’ll be gone in a few hours.”

A few hours. Ample time to search out a smoking gun.

A
fter riding
the elevator up and discovering I couldn’t access any additional floors without a key card, I hunkered down in the cafeteria. It was closed but the vending machines drew a steady stream. Employees wandered through, bitching about the “haboob.” It took me a while to figure out that it wasn’t a really mean nickname for a coworker that everybody knew, but rather the word for this particular kind of storm. Most of the people were clerical types, but a few wore key cards with a red square on the corner and looked labbish. Unfortunately, I was all Ms. Stranger Mascara Sweat Eyes in a warehouse uniform, which wasn’t inviting anyone to start talking.

Malcolm could have done something in this situation, rolled out the easy charm and humor. I’d picked up a few of his verbal tricks. Of course, he was also amnesia-inducing handsome, which wasn’t something one could learn.

Desperate times called for desperate measures.

I bought all the chips out of the vending machine and crammed most of them in the garbage. Then I set three bags in the middle of the table in front of me and waited. If you can’t do subtle, do tricky.

The bait was effective. A man wandered over and paid me three bucks for a bag of Doritos. He worked in Accounting, and was all too happy to talk about how
stupid
people were, especially
vendors
who were late on their
payables
. Or maybe it was receivables. I wasn’t paying attention. Two minutes into the rant, I pretended I had a phone call. Time passed. Restlessness gave way to boredom and boredom to sleepiness. How long could dust possibly wall off a city?

“You stuck here, too?” a scruffy thirtysomething man asked. He’d been standing in front of a vending machine for a couple of minutes, as though expecting it to spontaneously generate new offerings.

“Yep.” I’d stretched out across three blue plastic chairs and was using my uniform shirt as a pillow. Since he was standing more or less directly over me, I swung my feet to the floor and stood up.

He immediately backed away. He was about my height, with thick, dark hair that crept around his face and neck, and wire-framed glasses. His eyes were wide and blue and his cheeks would never lose their baby-boy roundness. Cute if you were into short, harmless-looking men who probably earned good money doing things the average person could not understand.

“You took the last of the Cheetos,” he said.

I held up the bag. “I’d be happy to share.”

“Shit, that’s hot.”

Short, harmless-looking men with zero social skills.

“Sorry.” He stared at the floor, a flush creeping up his neck and over his cheeks. “That was rude. I apologize for cursing.”

“No harm done.”

He glanced at me before adjusting his glasses and, finally, raised his head again. “I’ve got some more snacks up in the lab if you want to trade for something better than this.”

“Lab snacks?” My mind boggled. “Will the test monkeys no longer eat them?”

“We don’t test on monkeys. Humans, yes.
Extensively
. But not monkeys.” He snickered then said, with a straight face, “That’s done in our facility south of the border. Less political heat, Dr. Stone says.”

“Well, Dr. Stone would know.” Whoever that was. “My name’s Andrea.”

“Oh, hey. I’m Kevin.” He stuck his soda in his armpit and extended his hand, then squealed and hunched over when the cold breached his clothing.

“Hi, Kevin.”

“Houston, we have a problem.”

I looked around. “Do we?”

“I’m sorry. I’m…” He made a gurgling sound and leaned down to grab both his knees. “I have a condition. I get these tic attacks. Usually it’s not this bad, but I’m supposed to be somewhere and the storm has me stuck here.”

“Tics? Like, Tourette’s? For real?” My eyebrows shot up when he nodded. “I bet that’s challenging. What department do you work in?”

“I’m a chemist in r-r-research and development. I work with Dr. Adams’s oral care group and Dr. Stone, of course. In dermatology.”

That perked me up. Radia, as it was originally intended, was a skin product, which I was pretty sure went under dermatology.

“You know what, Kevin? Dust storms make me crazy hungry. What say we take a look at those monkey snacks?”

“Shit, that’s hot.”

“Okay, then.”

Kevin’s “lab” was a windowless, shotgun-style room with industrial-blue laminate tiles, dying blush-pink countertops and stark white walls. Swatches of fabric hung from a plastic stand that stretched across the counter like the world’s longest, weakest coatrack. The fabrics ranged from leather to corduroy and were all…dirty. I balked a couple of steps into the room while Kevin ambled on, dropping his wallet onto a scuffed metal desk and his soda onto a counter. A large clock with a red second hand ticked audibly on the wall.

“What is it you’re testing?” I asked, pointing.

“We’re considering adding blue pigment to one of the psoriasis creams. There’s a concern that it’ll stain.”

“Does the blue pigment make it work better?” Slightly less skeeved out by the stains, I wandered through the lines of fabrics, all different textures and colors. It was hard to believe that a place this concerned with whether a customer’s velour pajama pants would discolor from a necessary medicine could create something that could kill.

A door at the back of the room opened and a pale, lanky man in a hairnet strode in.

“Hey, Bill. This is Andrea.”

“Hi, Bill,” I said.

Bill muttered something that sounded nothing like a greeting, pulled a box of non-latex gloves from a cabinet, and stomped back through the door. He paused at the last second to glare at me over his shoulder. Wow. If the company didn’t have a policy against hostile psychos, maybe they were capable of manufacturing deadly drugs.

“Market research said blue makes things appear more refreshing. It’s all about making the cash.” Kevin opened a mini fridge crammed up against the far wall and pulled out a bag. “Cookie?”

“I don’t know. Are they as refreshing as clear skies and pristine oceans and…” I stopped, hand raised, senses expanding. There was a vampire in the room, or there had been not too long ago.

Mistaking my hesitation, Kevin peered at the label. “Are you allergic to nuts or something?”

“No, nuts are fine.”

The room had no windows, so a vampire could have been here during the day. But if so, where was it now? The only other door in the room, other than the one Bill had come through, looked like a closet. The sensation was a little off. There was no emotional resonance, no familiar niggling that “showed” me what it was feeling. Maybe it wasn’t a vampire but something that belonged to one, an object containing a piece of its power the way Chev’s territory belonged to her without being her.

That thought didn’t stop my stomach from tightening with anxiety. I took the cookie with a forced smile and angled myself so that I could keep each door and small shadow within my line of sight. “So what else do you do here, Kevin? I imagine it’s far more interesting than the warehouse.”

“What do you do there?”

“Look at boxes. Point to boxes. Lift boxes.”

“Oh.” He sounded surprised, like he’d thought warehouses were supposed to be fun. “Up here it’s product development, mostly. The fine-tuning after the R and D phase. It’s a competitive business, so we’re always pushed to innovate. Of the products I’ve developed, three are on their way to posting profits.” His pride was unmistakable. Maybe that was a rare accomplishment.

“Are they that effective?”

Kevin shrugged and bit into his own cookie. “No idea. They sell well.”

“And that’s all that matters?”

“Nobody cares about efficacy if they’ve never heard of the product.”

“I guess. Will Dr. Stone be mad that I’m up here, or are the labs open to all employees?”

“He’s at a conference this week,” Kevin said with a smirk before glancing at the door Bill had come through. “You aren’t technically supposed to be up here, but it’s fine so long as you don’t touch anything. You aren’t going to touch anything, are you?”

“I’m just here for the snacks, man.”

“Ooh!” Kevin power-walked to the other end of the lab. “Do you want some samples?”

I followed him to where he bent over a deep drawer. He pulled out small tubes, yellow with black caps, and I took them as he shoved them into my hands.

“That’s sunscreen and sunscreen with tint. This is acne. Wrinkles. More acne.” He tossed a few sample jars onto the counter, then came up with a couple of white ones. “This is an under-eye thing that actually works. More effective than hemorrhoid cream if you drink too much or eat a bunch of salt. This one’s for psoriasis.” He raised his eyebrows in question.

I shook my head. “Do you have anything that’s antiaging?”

He poked around, turning over vials and tubes with his finger. White with clear caps, red with gold. And one long, thin vial with an
R
in brush stroke font. I had to stop myself from shoving him out of the way.

The insignia for Radia was written in a sweeping teal font designed to look like feathers. Applied by humans, it would melt fine lines, create a youthful appearance, blah blah blah. Applied by the undead, it would result in the vampire stalking and tearing through anybody unlucky enough to cross their path. I shuddered at the memory of the altered suckers, bloated with blood and fiending for more.

“I don’t think so. Is it for your mom or something? You know you can buy the non-prescription stuff at cost. Family discount.”

“Nice. I’ll give that a try.” I watched the Radia sample roll toward the left side of the drawer as he slid it closed. “Does Bill have a drawer like this I can raid?”

“Bill’s in testing.” The corner of his mouth pulled down and he busied himself with pulling the bartered chips out of his bag. “He mostly works with component elements and failed batches.”

“What happens when products fail? Are they dangerous?”

“You don’t want the samples he’s got. They’ll turn you pink or give you a third eye or something.”

“Ugh, no. I’d have to get up a half hour earlier if I had to cover up a third eye each day and I am not a morning person.”

Kevin grinned and shoved another cookie into his mouth. We talked about Phoenix and the weather, and I did my best to sneak in probing questions, but by the time Kevin got around to showing me his new favorite YouTube video—undergrads at UCLA, his alma mater, dressing up as dinosaurs and scaring the crap out of each other—he was past answering questions. All the while, a tiny, paranoid spot in my brain expected Bill to kick down the door with a platoon of raving vampires at his back. Irrational, but I’d been surprised by nasty things before and the guy didn’t seem to like people.

By the time the dust storm cleared, we’d eaten so much junk food that I worried I’d actually need to use that eye cream. And I’d stolen the vial of Radia while Kevin was digging around in his backpack to find his phone. Derrick eased behind me after I pulled out of the parking lot, the combination of washer fluid and dust making a mud frame around his windshield.

My stomach tightened as I passed the border into Tenth World territory, but calmed when I entered the hotel. Chev didn’t only regulate where the humans went, she also regulated the vampires that were allowed on the upper floors. Those I passed were mostly staff. They moved briskly, but not inhumanly fast, and kept their eyes averted. Not all humans were aggressive, and being turned into a vampire didn’t make you that way unless you were pushed. Maybe Chev, despite being ungodly powerful and a micromanager that rated her own reality show, was a good boss.

Mickey had gone to the movies with a couple of feeders, and Malcolm wasn’t back yet so I showered and wrote out everything relevant that I’d learned at Goya. I described the little I’d learned of Dr. Stone and mentioned Bill in a way that I hoped would provoke interest but not result in him being dragged off the street. Likely he was only guilty of having a surly attitude. I tracked down Petr on the other end of my floor. He answered on my first knock.

“Do you have an envelope?” I asked, holding out my letter. Petr returned to a desk attached to a credenza that ran the length of the wall. He had a suite, and it wasn’t only a separation of bedroom from living space. Tenth World apparently took business seriously. The desk was insulated, with a steel rolltop, and the sitting room was dominated by an eight-person conference table.

“Leave it on the table,” he said. I frowned. Vampire-to-vampire correspondence was customarily sealed tight. Not that couriers weren’t trustworthy—I’d certainly never risked a peek—but there was no telling who might.

“Are you including it in a larger package?” I asked.

“All these years of service and you know nothing.”

“I did a job,” I said evenly. “I never served anyone.”

He snorted, then spun in his rolling chair as the door burst open. My hand flew to my bag and closed on the knife in the side pocket. Soraya marched in with a large duffel bag. She wore a fitted black shirt with a high neck, something silver glinting over the top of the collar, and what remained of loose pants. One leg had been torn off at the knee. She didn’t acknowledge us, merely dropped the bag on the couch and walked straight back out.

“Hey, Soraya?” I released the knife and followed her. Was she so out of it that she didn’t recognize that she was hurt? “Are you okay? Do you need… Oh,
shit
.”

Down the hall, she pulled a limp body off of Malcolm’s shoulder. A female drooped around his other arm, shambling along, battered skin showing through her torn clothes. Behind them, two males hobbled together in a painful-looking jumble of limbs. They were all dressed similar to Soraya in thick, flexible fabrics. Tactical casual.

“Petr, you’ve got, uh…incoming. Incoming casualties.” I glanced back into the room to see him unrolling a tube of heavy plastic on the table. That was some kind of prepared. I helped him shift it around until the surface was covered. He dropped the roll, pushing it so that it glided across the room toward the door.

“Open that bag,” he said as he slammed the desk closed around his laptop, securing it against the vampire energy. I unzipped the bag, then recoiled at the sight of a slippery pile of blood bags. Oh, this wasn’t going to be good.