henri dunn 01 - immortality cure (6 page)

“Where do you get these other party drugs?” I asked. “I was told to find someone named Alana.”

Brian-Blake-Brad raised an eyebrow. “Alana is a solid contact, although last I heard, she was pushing that Lemondrop stuff hard. I have a friend who can get us all something low-key.”

“We don’t need drugs,” Erin said sharply. She winced at her own harshness and turned to me. “Sorry. I’m trying to stick to alcohol. One vice is bad enough.”

“That’s smart,” I said, and meant it. Some people could use street drugs recreationally and have fun, but in the majority of cases I’d seen, the stories had a sadder end. Of course, most of my personal experience came from watching vampire-obsessed mortals who were hell-bent on some form of self-destruction regardless of the method, so maybe it wasn’t a fair sample.

“There’s Alana,” Brian-Blake-Brad said, tilting his head toward the bar. I spotted her right away because of her hair: her pixie cut had been dyed white and streaked with pink and purple. I stood quickly, the alcohol rushing to my head, and then had to take a moment to get my bearings. I gave Erin a sincere apologetic look and then bolted away.

Up close, Alana was dressed like a stylish file clerk. The hair was the only wild thing about her. She wore slacks, heels, and a pretty blue blouse, like she’d just come from a corporate office job. She had a cool air about her as she ordered a martini, leaning slightly against the bar.

“Alana Chen?” I asked.

Alana turned and beamed at me like I was a long lost sister. She was obviously more of a people person than I could ever hope to be. I guessed in her business she had to be. “What’s up?” she asked. Friendly, but with an air of “let’s get this done, I have places to be.”

“I’m a friend of Neha’s.”

Alana’s smile widened, her glossy pink lipstick catching the light. “Great.” She nodded to a corner. I spotted Erin watching me. Pretended not to care. I was not here to pick up a date. I was here to solve a murder. Once we were in the quieter corner near the restrooms, she asked, “What did you want? I’m a little low on stock—”

“I have some questions,” I said, cutting her off.

“Questions?” The careful saleswoman mask slipped.

“My name is Henri Dunn. Like I said, I’m Neha’s friend. I’m here because Ray was murdered and I’m trying to figure out why.”

Alana’s face twisted, her brow knitting together. “Are you serious?”

“Unfortunately,” I said.

“That’s … wow.” Alana shook her head, disbelieving. I couldn’t hear her heartbeat—that’s a good way to tell if people are lying—but I could see the shock and confusion register on her face. Unless she was a seriously good actress, she hadn’t been the one to kill him. That didn’t rule her out entirely, but it put her lower on my suspect list.

“What happened?” she asked, her voice quiet as if she wasn’t sure she even wanted to know.

“That’s what I’m trying to find out. The killer took whatever drugs were on hand at the time. That may have been the motive. Have you heard of anyone new on the scene trying to sell Lemondrop or unload a new supply?”

“No.” She considered, worrying her lip. “The thing is, Lemondrop isn’t selling. There were a few … incidents a couple weeks ago. I think it was just a bad batch, but the damage is done. Most reasonable people are avoiding it in favor of Honeycut or Strawberry Pie.”

“Incidents?” I asked.

Alana sighed. “One guy took it and drank a bottle of Drano to prove he was immortal. The result wasn’t pretty. Another woman who took it stabbed her boyfriend over forty times, convinced he’d been possessed by demons. When she sobered up, she called 9-1-1, confessed, and stabbed herself. Since those horror stories made the rounds, it hasn’t been in high demand. Plus, the cops are cracking down on it hard. They might look the other way for some less damaging party drugs, but they can’t ignore a drug that may have inspired a murder-suicide. No one is buying it, and no one who wants to keep selling is selling it.”

I glanced over toward Erin’s table, but the view was blocked by the pillar we were behind. “Someone told me you’d been pushing it hard.”

“I was, before shit went down. It’s a good party drug if you don’t overdo it, and Ray sold it to me at a low overhead. But you can’t sell what no one’s buying. I know he was talking about needing to unload the rest, but I wasn’t about to take it off his hands.”

“So killing Ray for a supply of the drug would not be profitable,” I said.

Alana narrowed her eyes. “No. Why, do you think I did it? Because I sell to pay off student loans. I’m not a killer.”

“I don’t think that,” I said.

Dread sloshed around with the gin in my stomach. If Lemondrop wasn’t the target—and if it wasn’t worth much in street value to the designer drug community, it was hard to imagine it was—then what had been? Had the killer just raided the chemical fridge because it was there? Or had they been after something else in the fridge, like the Cure?

“Is there another reason someone would want a stockpile of the stuff?”

Alana shrugged. “Personal use, maybe. If it’s off the market, but someone is still a fan, they might have gone to Ray. But how they found him is a mystery. He was pretty good at keeping his contact list short. He wants”—she stopped, swallowed, and corrected herself—“he
wanted
to keep as far removed from the drug distribution as possible. It was just an income source to him, not a business.”

That made sense, for both Ray and Neha. Neither of them wanted to be in the designer drug business. It was a means to an end. Lemondrop existed because street drugs sold without the pesky need for regulation or legal loopholes or expensive human trials.

“You never told anyone where to find him?”

“No,” she said. “Absolutely not. That would have been a deal breaker, and anyhow, it’s not like there was a reason to. If Ray had stuff in stock, it went to me. He wasn’t handing it out to anyone else as far as I know.”

I considered, leaning back against the wall. Neha and Ray were the epitome of careful. The only reckless thing I could think of ever seeing either of them do was when Neha had jabbed a needle into my shoulder without warning, full of a serum she couldn’t begin to guess the effects of. No matter how many lab trials she’d run, live subjects are not the same as blood on a slide. But otherwise, they were cautious. They knew their work was too out there for the mainstream science community, and they funded it through illegal channels out of necessity, not any love of club kid culture.

“Do you know of anyone who wanted Lemondrop badly enough to kill for it?” It was a hopeless cast, fishing for any excuse to believe Ray’s murder had not revolved around the Immortality Cure. “Or anyone else who might want Ray dead?”

“No one even knew he existed, at least not from me. I never used his name.” Then she made a face. Considered. I straightened.

“What?” I asked.

“It’s probably nothing.” She chewed her bottom lip again. “Last week, I was over at Chaos Theory, down the street. This guy wanted to buy a lot of cocaine, the kind of big order I had to go to retrieve from my storage facility. When I got back, he didn’t have enough cash. Said he needed to wire money to his account so he could pull it out of the ATM but his phone was dead, so I let him use mine. Didn’t think anything of it. I’d been texting with Ray that night, so it’s possible he saw Ray’s name or number, but … ” She shrugged. “He was quick on the phone. I watched him the whole time. I highly doubt he had time to wire money and check my recent texts. And even if he did, I doubt he’d have seen enough to make the connection. And the money came through. He bought the coke.”

“You’re right, it’s probably nothing,” I agreed.

“The thing is, he’s not a regular customer. I was actually sort of wary of the sale because, though I’d seen him around clubs, I’d never had him approach me for drugs before. He was one of those clean-cut wannabe surfer white dudes, with bleached blond hair and a sleeveless t-shirt. But he paid. And if he’s into coke, Ray is not his guy. But that’s the only time anyone’s even come close to seeing or hearing Ray’s name from me.”

“So you have no idea who might have wanted him dead.”

“None at all. But I am sorry he’s gone. He was working on something else, a modified Lemondrop he could rename and keep selling. I’m going to sorely miss the profits.”

I thanked Alana, gave her my number in case she did come across someone trying to unload a large supply of Lemondrop, and then took one last glance toward Erin’s table. She was laughing with her friends. I could go back over there, claim I’d given up on the drug hunt and decided to stick around for another drink. I could be friends with Erin, and maybe that would evolve into something more. There would be no vampiric bloodlust making our companionship a constant risk to her life. This was what Neha had wanted to give me, because she couldn’t give it to her girlfriend, Kate. Mortal life, free of the constraints of being a creature that couldn’t tolerate the sun and needed blood to live.

Moments like this, I almost wanted to take it. Sunlight, no more driving need for blood, the ability to be in a loud, crowded place without total sensory overload. Being human wasn’t all bad.

But I had never been all that good at being human. And I’d been really good at being a vampire.

I wanted my undead, immortal life back.

I left the club alone.

CHAPTER 5

I
started to walk back up to Capitol Hill, but one block away, my feet protested making the journey in heels. I’d lived in the same apartment as a vampire, though paying rent was remarkably easier when I’d been bartending at Underground and stealing cash off my victims, who were killers and thieves and always had cash to spare.

Underground, or more specifically Rhonda Vine, had fired me for being a Blood Traitor. Rhonda was the bar’s owner and a vampire herself, and about as connected to Cazimir and the Factory as I had been: not very. She occasionally stopped by his property because vampires are more social creatures that they like to admit. Being immortal is isolating. Even the most misanthropic vampire will check in with other immortals now and then to reassure themselves eternity is not a black hole that sucks everything away.

I didn’t think Rhonda gave a single fuck whether or not I had fangs, but she had a business to run and she couldn’t risk losing customers because one of her bartenders was a traitor to all immortal kind. Being dropped like a poisonous rock sucked for a lot of reasons, most notably that I found myself suddenly jobless as well as suddenly human, and in need of a lot of things vampires didn’t need: food being the main one, but also heat and weather-appropriate clothes.

I called a car from my phone app and settled into the backseat for the short ride. Uneasiness swirled in my stomach. Or at least the gin did, which was mostly the same thing. The thought of going home to a cold, dark, empty apartment was too depressing, so when we reached my block, I told the driver to keep going to Volunteer Park.

The driver gave me an odd look in the rearview and asked if I was sure. Given that it was almost two in the morning and the park had seen its share of crime, his concern about letting me out alone in a park was understandable. But it was also none of his damn business. “I’m sure,” I said.

It probably wasn’t the smartest thing I’d ever done for my personal safety, but it was hard to convince myself I could no longer prowl around in parks in the middle of the night just because I suddenly I had a steady pulse again. Besides, I had a Taser I’d bought after the vulnerability of being a human woman walking alone at night had gotten the better of me. I’d thought about getting a gun, but that required more paperwork and I wasn’t sure my fake background would stand up to such scrutiny.

The air was cool and I wished I’d brought a light jacket, but the slight chill helped me sober up. The gin had hit me like a bus. Since being turned mortal, I’d been drinking wine and had bought a jar of vermouth-soaked martini olives because I liked the taste, but I hadn’t had a cocktail since the 1920s.

I walked around outside the Asian Art Museum. A woman passed me walking her large, fluffy white dog. She smiled. I smiled back.

I thought about the acrid, salty taste of Ray’s blood. It hadn’t tasted good, not like blood had when I’d been undead, but it had tasted powerful. All I could taste now was alcohol and pine, and I longed for another drop of blood to roll around on my tongue.

The fact that I was looking at the dog walker down the street and wondering what her blood tasted like was probably my cue to go home. On my way, I passed the place where I’d first seen Kate, Neha’s now-deceased girlfriend. She had been lurking behind the building, in the shadows, and I’d been drawn to the scent of blood. I’d found Kate standing over the body of a jogger, on the verge of panic, blood on her lips and chin, muttering to herself about how she’d messed up. The jogger was dead from the gash in his throat.

“I’m not supposed to kill,” Kate told me.

I could tell she was a new vampire. The traces of her mortality lingered, her skin still glowing with a little bit of life, the blood setting her cheeks aflame like someone who’d had too much gin. Kate had been short, with curves and hips. She wore yoga pants and a sweatshirt and her brown hair was tied up in a messy bun. She looked like the antithesis of every vampire you see in the movies: she was a normal woman, standing over a corpse.

I helped her dispose of the body and she told me the story of how she’d been turned into a monster: she’d been mugged and beaten on her way home from work one night. She would have died, but a vampire had found her and turned her. “He asked if I wanted it,” she said as we dropped the body in Lake Washington. “But I was so out of it, I didn’t really understand. I would never have—I shouldn’t have said yes.”

She told me he’d tried to convince her to stay with him for her own safety, but she’d wanted to go home to her girlfriend and had escaped. And then on the way, she’d come across the jogger, and instinct had taken over.

She was terrified, shaking, and miserable. I could have walked away. I could have put Kate out of her misery and saved the world from one more new vampire who lacked control over her bloodlust. But instead, I’d walked her to my apartment. The next night, I took her to Underground, where vampire groupies hung out, and she found a mortal willing to donate some blood. And then, once she’d drunk enough that she didn’t pose a hazard to anyone with a pulse, I took her to see Neha.