Hellbent (11 page)

She couldn’t have possibly calculated a question more likely to inspire guilt and self-hatred in the pair of us. And it might’ve been calculated, for all I knew. The kid has always been a master manipulator. Or maybe she was only a little girl who’d found some semblance of stability for the first time in her short life, and she was watching its foundations crack beneath her feet.

In short, that kid did in five words what I’d attempted in ten minutes of hollering. She drove him to silence, and to something like contrition.

His only defense was to say, “I … well, I was thinking about taking a trip, that’s all. To California. I was going to visit someone.” It was a chickenshit way of spinning the truth. “I’d think you’d be thrilled with the idea—having no one around to bother you about your math skills for a few days.”

Oh no he
didn’t
. He wasn’t getting off the hook that easy.

I said, “He was going to take a very dangerous trip to California, yes. But I think I’ve convinced him to stay home with you guys while I go check things out.”

He glared at me with his silver, unseeing eyes. Actually he glared at a spot just to the left of my head, but hey. I give him an
E for Effort. He set his jaw and said, “Raylene has offered to do this, yes. But it’s not a smart idea.”

Domino grasped the situation, and was kind enough to be on my side. “It’s a better idea than you going down there, ain’t it? Were you going to go by yourself? I’d go too, if you needed me. But you didn’t even ask.”

This was possibly the sweetest thing I’d ever heard the boy say, but now was not the time to pat his head over it. I didn’t even look at him. I made sure we were all three ganging up on the blind guy, who lived with the world’s guiltiest conscience.

And a few secrets, obviously.

Deeply buried secrets, and therefore dangerous ones. I filed this information away and resolved to consult it later, in the event that I began assuming I knew everything about everyone under my roof.

“Thank you, Domino,” Ian said. “That’s a very kind and generous offer, but I did not ask for your help because I did not want to invite you into any danger. Raylene is right. It’s a risky trip. And I suppose she’s furthermore right that it would be smart for someone else to investigate the situation before I enter it. But this is a time-sensitive matter,” he said directly to me. “I have a … someone I care about, in San Francisco, and I need to make sure that he’s safe.”

“Your son?” Pepper asked. Of course she asked. She has ears like a fennec fox.

“Yes, dear. He’s not my child, exactly. I’m a different kind of father to him.”

Either the sensitivity of the topic eluded her or she ignored it. “You made him a vampire?”

“Yes, that’s what happened. He is in danger.”

I was quick to note, “But Ian will be in
worse
danger if he gets
too heroic. So it’s settled then!” I clapped my hands in a gesture of, “Hurrah, we all agree!”

“Settled?” He frowned. Hard.

“Yes,
settled
. I’m fresh off a case that didn’t pan out, and nothing else is on deck. I can take some time to bop around San Francisco, no problem. I’ll head down there tomorrow night and sort the whole thing out. Ian can hang around here and look after you two for a few days by himself, I assume.” After all, he’d been alone with them for the past twenty-four hours.

I stood up and walked to the kids, plucking Pita off Domino’s shoulder and giving him a squeeze. “Great. Then I’ll open a bottle of wine, we’ll all settle in for the night, and Ian, you can fill me in. Don’t leave anything out,” I admonished as I strolled into the living area. Over my shoulder I called, “I want to know
everything.
”

And I did. Kind of.

I
asked Adrian if he wanted to come with me, which was probably dumb, but at the last minute I started having second thoughts about going it alone. I didn’t tell Ian. I didn’t want to worry him, or to give him one more thing to gripe at me about.

Ian was a giant tight-lipped douche during my interrogation—I mean, during my attempts to learn more about the situation into which I was about to walk. But by the time we were done, I had what amounted to a dossier on the Renner family and all their known associates. Sure, it was almost a decade out of date—updated in bits and pieces, as he’d cobbled pieces of gossip over the years. I marked these pieces of gossip with an asterisk when I wrote them down. I needed to remind myself they weren’t set in stone.

Adrian was gung-ho to accompany me on the expedition until he remembered he’d have to take a week off work. Then he talked me into paying him for his time. I’d just write it off on my taxes as bodyguard work. If I paid taxes. Which I tend not to.

He wouldn’t be
guarding
anyone, anyway, but he was one of the only mortals I knew who was tough enough to come close to keeping up with me. For that matter, he was one of the only people I knew, period. And I didn’t feel like doing too much self-analysis with regard to why I wanted his company.

I’d spent a full human lifetime working alone. What had changed? I didn’t get it.

Maybe I was just as pathetic as Pepper, suddenly feeling my sense of security threatened. It was fragile enough, and new enough, without the impending threat of Ian leaving us to stress us all further. We’d only had our weird little collective for about six months; before that, everything had been utterly upended. Building a cocoon of safety is a lengthy and terrible process. I hate doing it, and I didn’t want to do it again anytime soon.

Like I said, I fear change. I fear it more than pain or death. And I fight it with every weapon at my disposal, every time it happens.

Adrian was one of my weapons now: a fist of inertia, helping me hold things together. He was also a potential liability, and I knew that, and I decided I didn’t care. He was a big boy; he could make his own decisions. I wasn’t forcing him to tag along. He was doing this of his own free will.

I picked him up from work on my way out of town. He’d already changed into dude-wear, which meant he was already fending off the guys from Cuffs, down the street.

Cuffs is a leather bar. Let us say no more about it.

Adrian is always good-natured about rejecting the advances;
he earns most of his living as a drag queen, and he knows how to fend off a grip. He’s straight—or so I gradually deduced, over the last few months of knowing him—and he always
does
decline. So far as I know.

But when I pulled up to the curb in the Taurus of the Damned, as he liked to call my car, he was up against a wall with a motorcycle leather-daddy leaning in for the kill.

I honked. The off-duty queen waved, excused himself, flung open the car door, then tossed himself inside. He chucked a duffel bag over the seat; it landed on the floor behind me with a very heavy thud, and I smiled to consider what useful stuff he might’ve brought along.

“Everything but the kitchen sink?” I asked as I pulled back out into traffic, nearly smacking a cyclist who didn’t think the rules of the road applied to him. Mr. Cyclist flipped me off, and I honked while gunning the engine to make sure he got the idea that he needed to get the fuck out of my way.

You have to be firm with the cyclists in Seattle. When it comes to smug self-entitlement, they’re worse than the pigeons.

Adrian unclenched his hand from the
Oh-Shit
bar and said, “What? I’m sorry, I thought we were going to die, so I wasn’t listening.”

“If you’re going to start this adventure by picking fights about my driving, I can pull over and let you out on the next corner.”

“Who’s picking fights? I’m just making observations,” he said, his faint Spanish accent buffing the words to a shine. He sounds a little like Antonio Banderas crossed with Tommy Lee Jones. It’s hard to explain, but easy on the ears.

“If you’re hinting that you’d like to take the wheel, you can forget it. And I was simply noting that you’ve got a whole lot of gear.”

“Of course I do.”

“You don’t have to pack like you’re going to war, you know. I’ve got that covered.”

“Sure,” he agreed. “But sometimes you forget things.”

“No, I don’t.”

“And when you forget things, it’s up to me to pick up the slack.”

I said, “You’re full of shit.” Because we both know I am the most ludicrously overprepared woman in the world. I have a stack of neuroses that a toddler could use for a booster seat, and those neuroses keep me braced for every possible contingency.

He asked, “Did you remember the duct tape?”

“In three colors.”

“How about the handcuff master keys?”

“Two different kinds,” I said.

“And an extra shooter? With ammo?”

“I brought four, and if you want something small enough to stash, you can take your pick.” I’d seen his tuck-job when he’s dressed in full lady-wear and working a room. I had every confidence that he could hide a small firearm with such efficiency that it would go unnoticed by any casual searcher. It might not be comfortable, but it’d be successful.

We played that game all the way to the interstate.

I could’ve shut him up by pulling over and showing him what was in the trunk—an arsenal of emergency and self-defense preparedness—but I let him guess. Our grown-up version of “I’m thinking of something red” was more entertaining than calling out license plates from other states, or slugging each other in the arm every time we spotted a Volkswagen, that was for damn sure.

We stopped for the night in Medford, Oregon, to break up the trip. The drive from Seattle to San Francisco is about a thousand
miles long, so it’s not like we were going to make it in a straight shot—and we’d decided not to fly.

For all the previously mentioned ravings about packing lots of contraband, it’s easier to hop in the car and drive down the westernmost slice of the nation, even though Oregon has that weird thing where they won’t let you pump your own gas—“For your own safety” or some other bullshit. I hate filling up there, and the next night my hatred of this intrusive practice almost led to us running out of gas before crossing the California state line and finding a gas station where I could service myself. I mean the car. You know what I mean.

But we didn’t end up walking along the shoulder with an empty gas can and a scowl, despite Adrian’s dire predictions, and fully ninety minutes before dawn we were checked in to a nicely restored turn-of-the-century hotel in downtown San Francisco. It was a little close to the tourist district for my liking, but the room was quiet and clean, and it had two big queen-sized beds—which I joked about rather endlessly, at Adrian’s expense.

I tell you all that in order to tell you this: Within three nights, I was right where I’d promised I’d go, and doing exactly what I’d promised to do.

If Adrian were reading this over my shoulder, he’d take this opportunity to insert some snark about how I must’ve promised to sit in the hotel room and drink while surfing the Internet, but he’s a bitch sometimes, and there were moments when I wished I’d left him at home.

I’ve already mentioned that I’m not sure why I dragged him along, other than a whiny, obsessive need for comfort-company at a difficult time in my personal life. But it’s probably worth examining why
he
agreed to come along, when nobody in his right mind would have done so.

The answer, I suspect, is pretty simple: He adores me, and will do whatever I ask.

Ha! Yes, I’m kidding.

Don’t get me wrong, I think he likes me well enough—I mean, he’s the closest thing to a girlfriend I’ve had in ages—but that’s not the
real
reason he’s along for the ride. The real reason is sneakier and more sinister, and if he thought I didn’t know about it, he was deluding himself.

Adrian came to San Francisco on a vampire fact-finding mission because he wants to know more about vampires and how their Houses work. The underlying basis for this near-suicidal desire has to do with his sister, Isabelle—who was turned into one of us night-stalkers when she was a teenager. She was also experimented on by the government, but that’s another story. Come to think of it, that’s also the story of why Adrian is now a drag queen, and not a Navy SEAL. But I don’t like to repeat myself, so I’ll make this rehash quick.

Suffice it to say, Isabelle ran away from home—or was taken; that’s still up for debate—and ended up running with the House in Atlanta. Atlanta’s House is run by the Barrington family, and those sons of bitches are about fifty different kinds of trouble.

My own House in Chicago, back when I had one, was trouble, too, so I suppose I should qualify that statement by saying
all
vampire Houses are trouble. All of them.

But some Houses are more stable than others, and some are better run than others. The Barringtons aren’t just numerous, they’re psychotic—or at least their judge and her immediate family members are. They’re beyond capricious and well past understated. They’re the kind of vampires who dress like goths every chance they get, and probably have entire DVD collections dedicated to old movies about the undead.

They are very,
very
excited to be vampires. I would say “comically
so” if it weren’t so fucking frightening. It absolutely says something about the House that it’s so violent—and it creates such a preposterously high body count—but the mortal authorities are prepared to look the other way.

Obviously they know about it. They
have
to know about it.

But worst of all, the authorities probably aren’t even in the Barrington family’s pockets. They’re probably too scared to do anything about them, or maybe they just buy in to that old line the Mafia dons used to throw around—“We only kill each other.” But it was bullshit when the mob said it, and it’s bullshit when vampire Houses say it.

For the Atlanta House to be so unapologetically badass that it’s been operating this way for nearly a century … you
know
that means they’ve got power.

Why?

See, here’s the dark, terrible secret that every vampire secretly knows, but refuses to admit out loud: Houses can be huge and intimidating, and immensely dangerous to vampires and those who cross them, unwittingly or otherwise. But generally speaking, they can be brought down by ordinary mortals with very little effort and pressure.