Hellbent (12 page)

There, I said it. Call me an iconoclast.

Maybe it sounds strange, but it’s true. And it’s true because, for all our heightened senses, our speed, and our occasional psychic abilities … we’re fragile. We’re freaky little hothouse orchids, is what we are, and all it takes is sunlight to wipe us off the map. All you have to do to demolish a vampire House is show up during the day and burn some buildings down. You can effectively unseat an entire community that way. Simple. Brutal. Effective.

And rarely attempted.

The drawbacks are obvious. Anyone ambitious enough to try to burn out a House would have to get through an army of intermediary
ghouls (or not, if he or she were crafty enough); and there’s always the chance of collateral damage if mere mortals are employed or otherwise present. And most important, vampires tend not to let that kind of thing slide—so if an arsonist were to undertake such a plot, he or she would have to cover his or her tracks very, very well. Retaliation is a bitch with fangs.

I’m not sure why I just now used all that “his or her” bullshit. The truth is,
I’ve
thought about it before. A lot. Fantasized many a time about taking Chicago’s House by a cleansing, fiery storm.

But I’ve always chickened out. Or, if I were to treat myself more charitably, I’d argue that I came to my senses and walked away instead.

It was easier for me than for Ian. Ian was a power player, someone high up in the hierarchy. I was a total nobody. Bottom of the pack, and bottom of the barrel. I suspect that no one at all gave a shit when I left, except perhaps my “mother,” who was angry that I didn’t stick around and take the fall for her indiscretions.

To this day, I’m not sure if I escaped her because of my outstanding brains, wit, and paranoia … or if she only concluded that I wasn’t worth the effort. Either way, it doesn’t keep me up at night or anything. Not anymore. I stopped wondering about why she did the things she did a long time ago.

What was I saying to begin with? Oh yeah. Adrian.

So Adrian’s little sister became a vampire, then became a government subject in the same weird experiment (Project Bloodshot) that had blinded Ian. No, this wasn’t a matter of ludicrous coincidence, that three friends found out we had this weird connection; it’s this weird connection that brought us together.

For a long time, Adrian assumed that his sister was dead. After all, that’s what Uncle Sam told him—and he had no evidence to the contrary. But now we had reason to believe that she might well
have survived, and that perhaps she was roaming around as a loner.

As a favor to Adrian, I’d done a little bit of reconnaissance through the gossip grapevine, and I’d learned that Isabelle had most definitely
not
rejoined the Barrington House, which surprised me not at all. I’d also learned that there are rumors of a deaf vampire matching her description lurking around North Georgia, and Vegas odds suggest it’s her. Whatever she’s up to, she’s keeping a low profile like a smart girl. Any vampire on the outs with the Atlanta House would be wise to vanish (begging the question of why she’s still in Georgia, or back in Georgia, as the case may be), and any vampire with a significant physical disadvantage (see also: Ian) would be likewise smart to keep that under wraps.

There are no civil rights groups out there lobbying for fair treatment of the disabled undead. Disabilities make vampires targets. And nobody anywhere is going to do anything about that.

Adrian isn’t a vampire, though.

And in case it isn’t abundantly clear by now, I’m not the kind of vampire who runs around knocking off denizens of the night who are weaker in some fashion than myself. So if I could help Adrian find his sister, awesome. He’d owe me a favor, and he’d be happy, and I’d be two vampires into collecting the whole Bloodshot play set.

(No, we don’t know exactly how many vampires—or other creatures—were carved up by that project. I won’t know that for certain until I get my hands around the neck of a guy named Jeffery Sykes, and he’s proving rather difficult to locate. But I’m working on it.)

Come to think of it, I probably shouldn’t have brought Adrian along.

I was only putting him in mortal danger, and whether or not
he was excited about the prospect was rather beside the point. I didn’t think he could learn anything in San Francisco that I, personally, couldn’t have told him … but hadn’t yet. I’ve been trying to protect him by pretending that all my information is fiercely difficult to come by, and impossible for a living human to acquire.

It isn’t.

But it
is
true that if he went sticking his nose into vampire lairs, asking questions about a deaf undead girl tootling around Fulton County, he’d be calling dangerous, unwanted attention to them both. So far, I’ve been utterly unable to convince him of how bad this is, or how badly he should not attempt it.

He’d been sticking his neck out, which is literally the stupidest thing I can imagine anyone doing when it comes to vampires. That ought to be Rule Number One For Dealing With Vampires, right there. Don’t stick your neck out!

So I guess that’s why I invited him, if I have to offer a less selfish reason than “so I don’t have to do this alone.” I’d rather have him dive headlong into that danger while I’m standing around, available and willing to dive in after him and pull him out.

Adrian stole the television remote from me, and clicked through all the usual cable channels while I surfed the Web. “What are you looking for, anyway?” he asked. “When do we get out of this room?”

“As soon as I figure out where we need to go when we
leave
this room,” I said, answering his second question first. “You want to run downstairs and find a latte? Go ahead. This might take a few minutes.”

“Why?”

“Because dens don’t advertise. Or, okay, they
do
advertise—but not in any way that’s immediately obvious or helpful.”

He seized on the niblet of information I’d let slide. “Dens? What’s a den?”

“Sort of like a lobby,” I muttered, sticking a pen in my mouth and reaching for the pad of paper that sits beside every phone in every hotel room everywhere around the country. “Or … think of it more as a foyer, I guess. The foyer of a vampire House. It’s where they receive visitors, out-of-towners, and the like.”

“Is it a public place?” he asked.

“The storefront is usually public, yes. But the real action goes on somewhere else. Downstairs, more often than not.”

“So you’re looking for a storefront …” He dropped himself onto the bed beside me and narrowed his eyes at my screen.

“Not a
literal
storefront. Well, okay.” I chattered with a lisp as my mouth moved around the pen. “
Maybe
a literal storefront. Probably not.”

“You’re being obtuse.”

I removed the pen so I could reprimand him without sounding like a third-grader with a mouthful of paste. “I’m
trying
to answer your questions, but the answers aren’t so much
direct
. It’s like this,” I explained. “Dens are hidden in plain sight, but they aren’t marked with a big neon arrow pointing down, declaring VAMPIRES HERE! That would be stupid. Instead, the dens come with little telltale clues about them.”

“What kind of clues?”

“Subtle clues. The kind only another vampire would pick up on. They’ll have funny names—something with a double meaning, or sometimes an anagram of the House’s family name.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “All right. Then what’s the SF House’s family name?”

“Renner. Not super-inspiring, I know.” I jotted it down on the paper pad beside my thigh. “Or in case it broadens the possibilities,
the judge who just died … his name was William.” I scratched that down, too, and tried to imagine the letters in different configurations. “I’m not saying for absolute certain that we’re hunting an anagram, but it’s a place to start.”

“And probably not an actual storefront, but maybe.”

“Yeah. I mean, no. I mean … shit, Adrian. Look at the clock. It’s ten PM on a weeknight. We’re looking for an establishment that might reasonably be open, routinely, at ten PM on a weeknight—and much later than that. And nothing too quiet. Something noisy, like a bar or a club.”

“So a late-night coffeehouse is out.”

“Correct.” I scrolled through the listings, demonstrating that yes, I was checking the names and addresses of bars, clubs, theaters, and pool halls. There were, to my best estimate, approximately a bajillion of them.

“How are we going to narrow it down?” he wanted to know, and I didn’t know what to tell him.

“This isn’t my town, dude. If I were local, or if I had local ties, I could ask somebody and that would be faster. But I’m not local, I don’t know anybody local, and—”

“Why don’t you just ask Ian?”

I sighed heavily. “I
did
ask Ian. The last den he knew about closed down three years ago. And nothing has reopened in its place.”

“What was it called?”

“Claret Drip. It was an anagram of someone else’s name—whoever had been judge or family before the Renners came into the picture. Sometimes the new guys change all the signs right away; sometimes they let the old things ride awhile.”

“I get it. I think.” He flopped down on his stomach and propped his face up on his hands. “Wine is kind of a code for blood, and it was an anagram, too. Double the meaning, double
the chance someone would twig to the fact it was hiding a den. But probably not someone who didn’t need to find it.”

“Smart cookie. And now that you grok the generality of how this works, keep your eyes open for something similar. I’ll scroll slowly.”

“Scroll faster,” he suggested with an imperious swish of his finger. “I’m a fast reader.”

“I’m a fast reader, too, but I’m trying to give my subconscious a moment to absorb all this crap,” I complained.

He wriggled to make himself more comfortable, and the bed rolled like the wave pool at a theme park. I smacked him on the shoulder and told him to settle down, and he smacked me back, and told me to hurry the fuck up or we were never getting out of here. I told him it was his own damn fault for not bringing a laptop, and he replied that it was my fault for not telling him to toss one into his go-bag.

And after another couple of hours populated by similarly childish bickering, he jabbed at the screen almost hard enough to crack it. “Wait!”

“What?”

“This one, there. Look at it.”

I read aloud, “Ill Manner,” and clicked through to the listing. “Looks like a goth bar. But that doesn’t mean real vampires hang out there.”

“Ill Manner … the place’s name, though. Check it out—lots of the same letters as
William Renner.
” He took my pen and wiped off the end as if I were germy or something, and started fiddling with the letters on the hotel’s letterhead.

I observed, “It’s close, but not quite. Still …” I wondered if he wasn’t on to something. There was the double meaning of
manner/manor
, and vampires love a good entendre. “Hang on.
Maybe we’ve got this. What letters are you missing to make the anagram complete?”

“
R, I, W
, and
E.
”

“Hot damn,” I declared with a smile. “Ill Manner is on Wire Street. I do believe we’ve found it.”

“Great!” He hopped up, swung his legs over the side of the bed, and stretched so hard that his back cracked. “Let’s throw on some eyeliner and hit the dance floor. Or whatever the protocol is, in situations like these.”

“I think we’re a little old to …” I almost said “hit the dance floor” but then I remembered who I was talking to. “Never mind. Do you have any kohl? I don’t usually wear eye makeup, myself, but I think I could use some tonight.”

“Do I have any? Woman, I could write a book with it. And come to think of it, that’s true, isn’t it? I never do see you made up.” He gazed at me with a critical eye and his hands on his hips. “You’d better let me put it on you.”

“What? No. I may not be Rembrandt with a stick of liner, but I’m not a monkey at the obelisk, either.”

“My makeup, my rules.”

“I can’t believe you even
brought
makeup.”

“I’m sorry, have we met? Of
course
I brought makeup.”

“To a reconnaissance operation?”

He shut me up with, “In San Francisco? Hell yes, I brought makeup. And oh, look—it’s an emergency supply that
you
failed to pack.”

“Oh, shut up.”

“No. Now hold still …”

“This is ridiculous,” I griped, but in ten minutes he had me looking like a supermodel. A very pale, sulky, raccoon-eyed supermodel, but a supermodel nonetheless. I was impressed, but I didn’t tell him so. Didn’t want him to get a big head about it.

In ten more minutes, he’d given himself a good swath of guy-liner, which I qualify as guyliner because he wasn’t in drag. He was wearing black head-to-toe, just like me, but he was sporting a black fitted stretchy sweater and black cargo pants—and I was in a black blouse (not too frilly, but just a smidge girlie) and black cigarette pants. And boots. Always the boots. It’s hard to kick anybody’s ass in sandals.

By half past midnight, we were down in the lobby hailing a cab, and on the ride over we got our story straight.

“We need a story?”

“Absolutely. Neither one of us can or should walk in there cold, with nothing but a smile and a handshake to recommend us. First of all, you’re going to be my ghoul, get it?”

“Your
what
?”

“You heard me.”

“Do I
look
like a ghoul to you?” he asked.

“Ghouls are like serial killers, they look just like everybody else. At least, they do unless they’ve been ghouls so long they start the slow-change, but that doesn’t happen very often. You’ll pass for one, don’t worry about it.”

“What do I have to do to pass?”

“Everything I say. Down to the letter. And you have to be nice to me. You have to pretend you respect me, and you don’t want to kill me where I stand.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake. You’re making this up.”

“I’m not, and you’ll see that for yourself when we get there.”

He gestured toward the driver with a jerk of his chin. “Maybe we should have this chat … later? In private? There must be a coffee shop or bar nearby.”