Forsaken by the Others (7 page)

She snorted again and shoved me as I waggled my brows. “Something like that. Though
you’re one to talk. Finally knocked boots with the vampire, huh?”

The heat in my cheeks was sudden and intense. Sara’s exaggerated leer didn’t help.
I coughed into a hand, avoiding answering her.

“Yeah, yeah. You can dish it—”

“—but I can’t take it. I know.”

Smiling, she rose and stretched, closing her eyes as she got on tiptoe and arched
her back. Guess I wasn’t the only one feeling a bit sore after being cooped up in
the plane on the way here. When she was done, she patted my knee and then headed for
the door. She paused there, hand on the knob. “Get some sleep. We’ll meet with Clyde
tomorrow, start working this case, and stay busy so we don’t have to worry about what’s
going on at home. Sound good?”

I nodded, rubbing the back of my neck. With a flash of pearly teeth, she was gone,
her own door soon clicking shut quietly behind her. I rose to shut my own door and
start getting ready for bed.

My family might be a mess, my business in the toilet, my love life a shambles, and
my neck on the line with the cops, White Hats, werewolves, and who knew what else—but
I had a job to do. We wouldn’t forget our friends, our families, our commitments,
or our enemies, but we would be safe, and far enough away that the people hunting
us would most likely lose interest or forget about us given enough time. Arnold would
protect the rest of our friends and family. Royce would fix the mess and make it safe
for us to return. I hoped.

On the bright side, I no longer felt the pressure of outside forces pushing me around.
Even though I wasn’t thrilled about hunting zombies, Sara was here, and the two of
us could solve this case together. We’d make Clyde pay through the nose for our services,
which should put us on track to salvaging H&W Investigations, and it would most likely
keep us busy enough to forget all the worries we’d left behind in New York.

For now, that would have to be enough.

Though Sara and I both woke up long before the sun went down, nobody came to give
us any idea what we were expected to do. In the late morning, while the two of us
stumbled around the kitchen in search of breakfast, a lady with skin tanned dark from
hours in the sun and dark, silky hair swept up in a neat chignon, had bustled in and
introduced herself as Florencia, the resident cook. We were supposed to ring her on
one of the internal phone lines if we were hungry.

I wasn’t totally comfortable with the luxury of having a cook at our beck and call,
but Sara had been very gracious, thanking her and asking for what I assumed by the
sound was a Spanish dish. The foreign words rolled off her tongue as she conversed
with the cook, leaving me feeling foolish for taking French in high school. When Florencia
turned to me, I gave Sara a helpless look. She laughed and told the cook—in English,
making me feel doubly foolish—to give me an omelet and a pot of coffee, thanked her
again, and then led me to the kitchen table.

Outside of a restaurant, I had never had such fantastic food. Florencia explained
as she cooked that she had gone to culinary school and intended to open her own restaurant,
but that working for Clyde had given her the opportunity to earn the capital she needed
to finance the venture.

“Three more years of this,” she said, flipping the omelet in the skillet with the
kind of practiced ease I had only seen in movies and TV shows, “and I should have
enough to start Mama Flora’s. I have my eye on an old restaurant near the pier. If
the market holds steady, I’ll have everything I need, and Mr. Seabreeze has promised
to help with the negotiations and decorating.”

Sara and I congratulated her, though we both raised our eyebrows at her blithe mention
of Clyde’s promise. Though he was clearly the type to showboat, if he kept his word
and was truly so good to his faithful employees, perhaps he wasn’t quite the mercenary
we had assumed.

Royce had proven to me that not all vampires were evil, mindless beasts, and that
they were capable of being compassionate. We hadn’t had the opportunity to get to
know Clyde, so considering he had been backed into a figurative corner due to this
zombie infestation, it was possible we had thus far only seen his worst side. Granted,
I was pissed about the cell phones being confiscated, but not entirely surprised.

At first, Royce had also been a bit of a manipulative dick, which was part of why
it had taken me so long to see that he wasn’t such a bad guy. I imagined it might
be the same with Clyde. We were nothing special to the vampire. Just another couple
of “dumb humans”—only good for food or entertainment, if that much. He didn’t respect
us yet, so he saw no reason to treat us as anything other than pawns. Now that I had
played the Other games of dominance and grandstanding for a few rounds, I was confident
I could find a way to show him that Sara and I had teeth.

Close to noon, we were munching on some snacks while we hung out in the den with the
big screen. As we were trying to get into daytime TV, someone showed up with a depressingly
thin file folder containing the information Clyde was willing to give us about the
zombies, and an envelope delightfully thick with cash.

After storing the envelope in one of Sara’s bags, we opened the file on the sprawling
kitchen table to see what was inside and spread everything out. There wasn’t much.
A list of missing and dead vampires, a few blurry pictures, and a couple of handwritten
notes describing what surviving human servants had seen. Though it took some doing
to figure out what the shaky scrawl spelled out, we had a rough picture of the situation
before long.

Though they were, of course, frightened and disoriented by what they had seen, their
stories were clear enough. Most of the descriptions involved great numbers of the
walking dead—and there was no doubt that’s what they were, considering the way the
survivors wrote of stink and rot—shoving them aside to reach their vampire masters.
The accounts didn’t include the handwritten notes of what happened after. The pages
were missing, or had been deliberately removed. Instead, there were a couple of photos
clipped to the back of the folder, standing mute testament to the massacre that must
have taken place.

I’d never seen a body torn apart before. Though I’d been in the room while a pack
of werewolves had torn apart a vampire and a mage, feasting on their remains, I had
kept my eyes closed so I wouldn’t see anything I’d never be able to unsee.

And now, nightmares of those pictures—the chunks of missing flesh, the shredded flaps
of skin, and the gleam of white bone set in a pool of crimson—would haunt me for the
rest of my days.

Sara grew very pale next to me, but we both somehow managed to keep from barfing.

We quickly shoved the pictures and accounts of the survivors back into the folder,
then moved on to the note-covered maps. If not for all the assurances in the folder
that no one but vampires had died, I would have said to hell with the case then and
there.

Instead, we soldiered on, spending about an hour going over maps of Los Angeles that
had notations about where the bodies of dead vampires had been discovered. We needed
to get to know the lay of the land and the places we would have to explore. Though
all the attacks had occurred within LA County, no two had happened in the same place.

When she saw what we were doing, Florencia gave us some help figuring out where we
were and the limits of Clyde’s dominion. His territory, though it included major cities
like Santa Monica, Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, and Hollywood, was quite a lot smaller
than I was expecting. Considering Royce controlled multiple states, it was a bit anticlimactic
to find out Clyde had such a small amount of land to call his own. When we asked about
the areas that fell outside of his purview but were still in Los Angeles County, Florencia
didn’t have any answers.

The one common thread we could see was that many of the attacks took place close to
properties Clyde owned on the fringes of his territory. Whoever or whatever was controlling
the zombies appeared to be situated somewhere just beyond the borders. We couldn’t
be sure since we didn’t know this area like we did New York, but hiding that many
decomposing bodies meant they had to have a damned good place to store them in this
heat to keep any neighbors from finding them. My guess was a morgue, a climate-controlled
warehouse, or perhaps they were kept somewhere outside of the city—maybe in the Angeles
Crest Forest?—until they were needed and then transported wherever the next attack
was supposed to take place.

There were problems with each of those theories, but until we had a chance to examine
some of the locations of the attacks in person, I had the feeling that we wouldn’t
be able to narrow this search down any more than we already had. More than anything,
I wanted to know what the survivors’ notes didn’t say. Who were Clyde’s enemies? Who
in the supernatural community around here had the kind of power it must take to command
a small army of the walking dead?

Arnold might be able to help with that end of things, though I wasn’t sure how much
he’d know about Others in California.

Sara and I decided to put off further speculation until after we’d spoken to Clyde.
We spent the rest of our day mostly bored and occasionally shuddering when the memories
of those pictures resurfaced during our discussions about where to start our search.

The most likely place appeared to be near Burbank and Glendale, where three attacks
had occurred close together.

Shortly after sundown, I had a nosebleed tinged with the black stuff again. It was
far less intense than it had been back in New York, and most of it was in my nose
and throat instead of everywhere else, but it was still awfully unpleasant. Sara helped
me to the bathroom and sat with me while I spat out ropy strings of blackish liquid,
washed it from the corners of my eyes, and blew it out my nose. It was disgusting,
yes, but nowhere near as painful as it had been the other times. There wasn’t as much
of the crud as there had been that first night, or even in the shower with Royce the
night before last.

Sara said nothing as she held my hair off the back of my neck while I washed the crud
out of my mouth, though I know she must have had questions. She knew I’d tell her
when I was ready.

Unfortunately, it was going to be awhile before I could bring myself to explain. She
might have been my best friend, but the memories of those hours of helplessness, of
pain and blood and knowing I was no longer quite human, were too close.

Before I could help her come to terms with it, I needed to do something about that
myself.

Not long after I finished cleaning myself up and we returned to the kitchen, a knock
on the door frame startled us. A new security guard—a woman, one I didn’t recall seeing
last night—was examining us with dark, narrowed eyes.

“Ladies. Clyde would like to see you now.”

Sara and I exchanged a look before rising and following the guard to the main house.
I was annoyed to note she was quite a bit taller than me, so perfectly beautiful and
graceful with her high cheekbones and sleek, braided hair that I knew she must have
been another vampire. Her dress was like that of the security guards I’d seen last
night, though she had guns holstered on either hip. Her deadly grace reminded me strongly
of Mouse, though there wasn’t much other resemblance.

We entered through the door near the pool deck. She took us through some hallways
to a room full of weird paintings and strange sculptures and told us to wait.

There wasn’t any place to sit, so we just stood awkwardly, staring around the room.
Separately, the pieces were just . . . well . . . weird. Together, they made a strange
kind of sense. The swirl of colors and clashing styles made me dizzy, so I made a
point of focusing on one piece. Of course. It had to be a Warhol.

My feet were starting to hurt by the time Clyde swept into the room, a bevy of buzzing
sycophants trailing in his wake. His hair was a different color this evening, no longer
black, but a deep chocolate color with frosted tips, making for a striking, punk-rocker
look that fit with the bare chest and drawstring leather pants slung low on his hips.
He waved a hand airily and the people surrounding him backed off, mumbling reassurances
about his hair, his clothes, something about appointments and a TV spot, and a few
other things I didn’t quite catch.

As the others backed away, he snapped his fingers at the security guard who had escorted
us. She froze, hovering near the door.

Once he was across the room, he turned to face us, and I could have sworn that his
eyes were a solid black. Like fathomless pools of pure hunger sucking me deep into
a cold, lonely place.

It might have been the space between breaths or an eternity before he looked away,
his attention fixing on a granite statue of a robed angel with sweeping wings, the
tracks of tears permanently etched across the cheeks of that androgynous face. Air
seeped out between my teeth in a hiss as tension ran out of me. Gut instinct told
me we were on the verge of experiencing something very nasty by his hands if we didn’t
watch our step. Made me wonder just how well that little charm around my throat—the
one that was supposed to prevent vampires and magi from messing with my head—was working.

“Good evening,” Clyde said, his voice smooth as silk and completely at odds with the
way he had devoured us with his eyes a moment ago. “I wished to see you before you
begin your search. Do you have any questions about what you saw in the file you were
given? Were you able to glean anything useful?”

Sara and I exchanged a look. As badly as I had wanted to snark at him about taking
the phone, now clearly wasn’t the time.

She stepped forward, and I let her lead. She was better at verbal sparring than I
ever was; a necessary skill I would need to hone if I was going to be spending much
more time around these strange vampires.

“Yes. We think we know where to start, but first we’d like to know who you think might
be behind this. Or any enemies who might have more information? They won’t know us,
so they might be willing to let something useful spill if they don’t realize we’re
working for you.”

He threw back his head and laughed, the sound booming through the room loudly enough
to make me flinch. When the sound tapered off, he rubbed a faux tear from the corner
of his eye. “My, you are direct. How refreshing.”

Sara was unmoved. She folded her arms and gave him an “I’m waiting” look. I did my
best to follow her example, though I don’t think I looked nearly as convincing or
intimidating as she did.

“I have no enemies, my dear. If I knew who it was, I would have taken care of this
matter myself.”

He added a charming smile at the end of that statement with just a hint of fang showing.
It was a pose Royce often took when he was trying to see if he could use his nature
to scare me into dropping information he could use, make me react in some calculated
way, or distract me from asking vitally important questions.

Though Sara was taken aback by Clyde’s answer, I wasn’t impressed. “You’re the master
vampire of Los-freaking-Angeles. Don’t tell me you don’t know where your enemies are.
There’s no way you could be this arrogant, and hold a city of this size for so long,
being completely ignorant of the whereabouts of the people who have a bone to pick
with you.”

Clyde stared at me, his dark blue eyes briefly flashing with embers of red in the
pupils. His expression remained stony and unwavering for a very long moment—and then
he smiled, making no effort to hide the fangs that peeked out from behind his lips.
“My, my, Ms. Waynest. I do believe I now see what potential Rhathos must have sensed
in you.” It had been a long time since I’d heard someone refer to Royce by that name.
The last one to call him that was Max Carlyle. It put me on alert since I doubted
anything good could come of it. “It’s a pity you won’t be staying here long. I suddenly
find I would like to know more about that clever tongue of yours.”