Finally Dead (Eve Benson: Vampire Book 1) (31 page)

“On the
good side, I already have an invitation to go meet them, tomorrow night.”

She went
still then, since it was kind of clear that someone there might just be
really
dangerous. As in the kind of person that she just wasn’t ready yet to handle.
Ancient Vampires, Greater Demons or even some kind of Super Mage.

Lenore
didn’t ask her anything, just patting her arm a few times, as if letting her
know that her place on the short bus was well and truly being saved for her.
Now if she could just find her safety helmet, she’d be all set.

That was
rude of her to think though, and she knew it. After all, mentally handicapped
people would be smart enough not to do the kind of thing she was considering.

The rest
of the day was easy enough, until Edom got in. Taking what Lenore had said to
heart, and knowing that he’d have heard from across the way, because Vampires
had good hearing, especially when someone said their names, she let him know
about her recalcitrant rule breaking, having ridden with the tow truck driver.

He
didn’t care about that part at all.

No, the
only thing
he
was concerned about was holding extra bodies in his
garage. Giving her a fake, and toothy grin, her maker glanced around the shop.

“So, you
can drive them to the Pinchot later and bury them. Go at least a thousand feet
off one of the main trails and make sure the hole is over ten feet deep. Of
dirt. The loamy easy stuff on the top, and pine needles, don’t count. If you
leave at dark you should be finished by three in the morning or so. Make sure
you don’t speed or call attention to yourself. Do you need a map?”

She did,
because Eve had no clue what he was talking about. It turned out to be a
national forest, so she put the rest together.

Still,
he had to go home with her, in order to show her how to fix the damage that had
been done to her car. Not that it was perfect, since they didn’t have time to fix
the window on the driver’s side that Rich had smashed in to get at the good
bits and wires on the steering column that he’d needed. It had been the right
thing to do at the time, but Edom shook his head at the mess.

Then
made her clean it all up before letting her go. It wasn’t that hard to hotwire
a car, it seemed, but making it all better afterward was a lot more work. That
was always the cost of doing anything, wasn’t it? Breaking things was easy,
making them a lot harder.

The trip
itself was uneventful. She was careful and drove to a trailhead so isolated
that there wasn’t even another car parked there. It was cold though, and when
she started running down the trail to get deep enough into the woods, it
started to snow. That wasn’t going to play though, since she didn’t have chains
or anything useful like that. In Vancouver they really weren’t needed, so she
hadn’t bothered. Now it seemed like a pretty big oversight.

The
carrying of the two bodies she did at one time, and the hole was dug a lot
faster than she would have thought, given everything. The ground wasn’t frozen,
so that part took a bit less than half an hour. True, she was cheating, moving
as fast as she could in the dark night, the scent of pine and rotting bodies
comforting for some reason.

She
dumped the two men along with the tarp, after going twelve feet down, because
making sure they weren’t found was a good thing to her mind. It was a really
isolated area, but just in case something happened, she wanted to make
retrieving the men as hard as possible.

Role
playing nerds.

True,
for that kind of lifestyle they looked pretty hard and even cute, or had, but
that was still the case. The two men, dead now, were just geeks that liked to
play games. Apparently with the wrong people. Before she left, after using the
shovel to tamp the dirt down, and trying to pull pine bows and some needles
into place to make it look natural, she said a few words.

“If
someone did this to you, set you on us, I’ll make sure they’re stopped. If I
can. Without getting myself killed, of course. I don’t want to promise things I
can’t back up. You two get the idea though, right? We aren’t just going to let
this go. Unless we have to.” It wasn’t a great promise, but it was honest, and
she wasn’t really certain that ghosts were a real thing. Spirits might have
been, but most of the things that she’d seen along those lines had been a lot
more intense than Casper.

Demons
and things like that. Vampires. Republicans. For that matter, Republican
Vampires. That was a thing, she’d been told. A lot of her kind were actually
pretty conservative, being that they’d been alive a long time, and old habits
died hard, if they did it at all. Richard Swerlin was from that political
party. Eve had never really thought about it herself. She could see that both
sides were more or less right in their main issues.

It
really
was
important to protect the borders, and stop crime. It was also
important to make sure little kids didn’t starve, and to see that people
weren’t abused by those in power. So, she probably wouldn’t be running for
office any time soon. Someone as wishy-washy as she was wouldn’t do a good job
that way.

She
thought about it as she drove back in the snow, but by the time she was most of
the way home, or at least back to
Troy’s
the snow had stopped and turned
to a nice drizzle instead. It was cold, but not enough for anything to be
coming down in November that would be pretty or interesting.

When she
got in she made sure to wash out the trunk, and searched as well as she could
for any little hint of rot or bit of blood. After that, she realized, she had
the night off. Which given that Edom had pretty accurately called that one, was
more like a few hours off, before she needed to go back into work. That meant
she had time to do a load of laundry though. Troy might have been a bachelor,
but he loved having clean clothing, and had his own machines for it. So she
didn’t have to leave to get that part done.

Then,
since those devices were in the basement anyway, she headed into Bey’s room, where
the books she was supposed to be studying were. Still right there on the table,
if not exactly where they’d been left. Cracking them open, she settled on the
nice sofa, curling up a bit against the right hand arm rest, her feet coming
up, after her shoes were off. She didn’t want to get dirt on the thing after
all.

The main
guidebook was a bit boring. It told her the rules of the game, and went on
about how it was story based, rather than having some kind of point objective.
There was no fighting allowed, on a physical level, so you had to handle
conflict resolution and challenges with coin tosses. Quarters were preferred,
or at least something of nearly that size.

You
needed to have heads to win, and if both parties in the situation got heads, or
tails, then you flipped again until only one person did. It was kind of basic,
but she could see it working well enough.

There
was more to it than that, but the basic set up was kind of simple. You made up
a character, assigned a given number of points to different traits and
attributes and then made up a story to explain why you were so fucked up. The
book didn’t put it
that
way, but it was pretty clear that was what would
be happening. She ran up a character for herself.

Gloria.
She was an Elth that put almost all her skill points into cooking. That would
explain why she was bringing in loads of goodies, too. Which reminded her to
get to that. It was pushing four, and she’d promised to bring some stuff for
everyone. Being a good Elth, that would mean a lot more than some lame ass
cupcakes, she knew. They prided themselves on homemaking, and things like that.
Being good with guests, too. If she was going to do it, there was no reason not
to do it right.

It meant
she had to run for the rest of the night, scrambling to make cookies, cupcakes
and some tiny sandwiches. Using up a lot of the food that Troy had. The idea
that he had baking stuff was interesting, but she understood it was due to the
fact that Zack used to live there. Greater Demons ate a whole lot, which meant
they cooked, too. It explained all the mixers and baking sheets, but not really
why he had fresh flour and eggs. She’d never seen him do any cooking in
particular. Not more than warming a can of something.

Which
meant, what?

Something
, for certain. There was no need
for him to have that kind of thing all the time if he wasn’t going to use it.
Eve supposed that he might be running a shelter for wayward Greater Demons,
but… Actually, that might make sense. Anne came around every now and again,
didn’t she? Darla too, most likely. If that was the case then having a kitchen
stocked with goodies to eat and things to make more of the same with was a lot
more plausible.

Unless
Finias was around a lot, too?

She’d
rarely seen him in Vancouver, but if a Greater Demon wanted to go places
without her knowing about it, that probably wouldn’t have taken all that much
work. It was really weird to find out that Troy, a guy that she’d known for
years, was the slave of a Greater Demon like that. Oh, she’d met some before. A
lot of them, really. Keeley collected them like they were going out of style.
The rest of her people were less likely to pick other people up that way
though. They all could do it though. It just took getting a person to agree
with them in the right way too. That varied from Demon to Demon though, and The
Mistress of Souls was the most dangerous one that way.

Zack was
probably the least likely to do that. So far at least. He was really young for
one of his people though. So was Keeley, but she was kind of a bad ass, so had
forced the other Greater Demons to admit she was an adult already. Apparently
by using a campaign of fairly intense murder.

Well, no
matter the reason, she made good use of the kitchen and supplies, putting out
six different versions of the cupcakes. Variations really. Different frostings
for them mainly, though some of them were filled with a light butter-cream.
They smelled nice to her, but she didn’t feel very tempted to eat one of them.
Eve had never tried it, but had been warned that her system wouldn’t deal with
carbs very well anymore. In a rather unpleasant fashion.

The
cookies all came out well enough, and while it was a bit of work, they also had
some Tupperware to hold it all in. Not that it wouldn’t need to cool though.
Hopefully she could get to the store before it was time to go, and get help
carrying the things in, or else she was going to be kind of stuck. The funny
part was that she could do it now. Bring in the towering pile of food, no
matter how much it weighed. It would just look ridiculous, her running down the
street that way.

She also
needed to get some things to decorate with, and probably a table for the food
to go on. That meant getting a truck, or van too. Eve started to regret her clever
plan of making a lot of things to buy everyone’s good will. Even if she had the
use of her car, that wouldn’t get her a table there, would it? Not unless she
could make one in place? That was a bit ambitious though, so she sighed, set
everything out to cool, made up the frostings and left it in the fridge, then
ran through the burning sun to get to work on time.

Though,
technically, she wasn’t
actually
working at the embassy, she realized.
No, she was just showing up each day. Lenore was just clever enough to set her
to work, doing things. Free labor, so it made sense, didn’t it? Really, she was
being a bit pushy, given that. Not that she wanted to sit around in the house
all day or anything. If she were going to be up and around anyway, which was
still her plan, then she needed to stay busy. There were soap operas, she
supposed, but the idea of watching one turned her stomach a bit.

It might
have been the balls out running that did it though. Walking, in direct
sunlight, but she was still pushing herself to move at a level that would make
it impossible to track her. That and some clever hiding would be enough, she
hoped, to prevent people from seeing her doing it. Otherwise it was just going
to be hard to explain, wasn’t it?

What was
that blur? Oh that was just Eve, the daytime slowpoke Vampire!

Grinning,
and not meaning it, she got into the mall, then waited a good half minute to go
in. The urge to scream was just too much. She couldn’t even tell if she’d
managed to go any faster this time. It had hurt though, so at least there was
that.

Today
though Lenore was in, and Cormack had already gone home.
If
he’d even
been the one working the night before. Sometimes it was Barb, and a few times
she’d seen some of the others do it too. Lenore had a staff there, most of them
were just too young to be trusted to run things on their own for very long.
Smiling she knew that she wasn’t really in that category either. Just pushier
than the rest when it came to doing stuff, probably.

“Hey
Lenore. You don’t have a truck, do you?” It was the kind of thing that Eve just
didn’t know about her boss. They’d known each other for a long time, but a
whole lot of that had been very impersonal, she realized. The woman had been
around her a lot, but she didn’t share a lot about who she was. Then, Eve
wasn’t a big sharer that way either, was she?

Then
there was a lot less information to put out, coming from her. She had stories
about school, being abused and her friends. A few jobs. That was pretty much
all. The coolest things she’d ever done had mainly been in the last few days
and most of that wasn’t anything that Lenore needed to hear about. No, she’d
been there for it all.

Her maker’s
boss smiled at her and tilted her head cutely.

“I can’t
say that I do. Do you find yourself in need of one?”

“Yep! I
made some snacks for the role playing peeps tonight. I’ll need a table. I
could
get you to hire someone, but frankly that would seem strange, I bet. As it is
it’s going to look catered practically. I’ve got mad skillz that way.” She
grinned, expecting her grammar to be corrected, since no one used that phrase
anymore, and hadn’t since she was a little kid.