On the Hunt (35 page)

He looked from Celeste to me. “I’ll stay here and take care of,” he paused, his eyes flicking toward the bedroom, “things.”

Just before we were about to leave, Vlad joined us at the door and dropped his voice. “Ruby is a lounge up top. Rouge is the lounge on the bottom. I’ll stay here with Celeste and make sure that Allison . . . stays dead.”

I nodded, and Pike and I disappeared down the stairs.

“So, lounge on the bottom?”

“Underground,” I clarified.

“That’s what we’re looking for, huh?” Pike asked as we got into his car.

“Yup. If it’s underground, it’s underworld.”

We were at Ruby right at lunchtime, when the sidewalks swelled with admins power walking in sneakers, fancy types ambling to three-martini lunches, and tourists trying on every iteration of sunglasses and hat. The neighborhood was bustling with energy but the doors of Ruby were firmly locked. I shielded my eyes with my hands and pressed them up against the floor-to-ceiling windows. It was dark inside, chairs on industrial-chic tables, not a single breath of movement from the inside.

“They don’t open until five,” I said with a frown.

“Well, at least we know where she isn’t.”

I rolled my eyes. “Great, so we can scratch one place off our list of thirty million.”

Pike held up two fingers. “Technically, two. We know she’s not at her apartment.”

“You’re not helping.”

“Yeah, well, you’re on fire.”

“What?” I glanced down at a lazy swirl of smoke coming from my shoulder and started slapping at it. “Oh! Crap! Geez!”

Pike’s arms were around me in an instant, warm and fleshy, and I relished the protective feeling as he gently steered me to the shade. “That better?”

The fire was out, but the sickening smell of ash hung in the air. “Thanks.”

“Well, we know another place Wendi won’t be.”

“Where’s that?”

“Outside. Unless Halflings don’t have the tendency to burst into flame at seventy-plus degrees?”

I plucked my sunglasses from my purse and slid them on, careful to stay in my little umbrella of shade. “After that scene? I don’t think Wendi is a Halfling anymore.”

“So . . .”

“So it’s only going to get worse.” I pressed my fingers to my temples. “I can’t think out here. It’s been a long time since I was new. It’s hard to think about where I’d go.”

My cell phone pinged and the little alarm clock icon let me know that there was now less than twenty-four hours for me to gather up the scraps of fabric and recruit a new model for my runway show. There was also a new tweet from Fashion Fish—@FashFish01:
Mystery designer kills it w new gown. Who is this phantom fashionista?

The tweet set my teeth on edge.

“Something about Wendi?”

My head was starting to throb. “No. I’m just running out of time to get my line finished and there’s this new mystery designer who’s stealing all my thunder.”

Pike swung his head to me and I held up a silencing hand. “I know, I know, a young woman is dead . . . ish, on the verge of decimating an entire city block, and all I can focus on is fashion. It’s my afterlife, Pike, my livelihood. I’m not completely callous, but this is important to me.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything.”

I softened. “Really?”

Pike nodded, then abruptly stopped. “Well, I was actually going to say that all of this sounds like it could best be solved with a cheeseburger and a side of fries.”

I quirked an annoyed eyebrow and Pike scoffed. “What did you think I ate? Birdseed?”

We started to walk. “So, a mystery designer, huh?”

I nodded, the annoyance seeping into my every vein. “No one knows who she is. She just popped on the scene”—I snapped my fingers—“Like that.”

Pike stopped and looked at me. “And you don’t find that odd?”

“I find that exceptionally odd, actually. I mean, this designer comes out of nowhere and bam, not only on the fashion scene but adored by Fashion Fish? Fashion Fish is a legend in the fashion blogging community, and I was her favorite find.” I felt my lower lip push out, my sadness all encompassing.

Pike looked skeptical. “I think by definition ‘legend’ has to be something that’s older than the Internet and not a fashion blogger. That’s not what I meant, though. I meant, this mystery chick comes to town, is getting all this great press, and yet still decides to remain hidden? And then a supermodel is mysteriously dumped on your vestibule floor and turned into a vampire? Maybe the designer is a vampire, too.”

I put my hands on my hips, ready to scoff at his theory—but it wasn’t all that crazy....

“Okay, sure,
possibly
. But why would this other vamp drop one of her bodies at my feet?”

“Obviously, she knows you’re a vampire, too. Maybe it was like, a peace offering or a sign of respect or something. Don’t you guys do that?”

I narrowed my eyes. “Like when a cat leaves a dead bird on its owner’s pillow?”

Pike glared at me. “I’m just trying to help.”

We ducked into a tiny, dingy café—one that I was sure hadn’t been there yesterday but had enough grease buildup and dried mustard stains to prove me wrong. The beer-bellied man at the counter looked like he’d been standing behind that counter longer than I’ve been made. After Pike ordered his burger, something disgusting and gluttonous with one slab of animal flesh packed on top of another, the counter man looked at me and snorted when I said just water would be fine for me. We sat in a booth at the back of the restaurant, me taking in everything and everyone while Pike drummed his fingers along the cracked Formica tabletop.

“So since Wendi”—he grimaced—“fed off Allison, that makes her full-fledged, then?”

I nodded. “More or less. She’s still got a while before she gains her full strength, but yeah, for all intents and purposes, Wendi’s V-card has been punched.”

Counter guy dropped a plastic basket piled with fries and Pike’s burger just as I finished my statement. He kind of smirked, his forehead shiny with spits of hamburger grease.

I expected Pike to unhinge his jaw and swallow his burger but he just stared at it for a beat before speaking. “Is that what happened to you?”

I was taken aback, a wave of prickly heat racing down my spine.

“When you . . . you know.”

“No. My sire I—he—” It was the vampire equivalent of the “when did you lose your virginity” conversation, only much more prickly as I couldn’t flippantly mention a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon, senior prom, or the back of some guy’s Chevette. We couldn’t share the war stories, the awkward first moments, the silent moments afterward when everything needed to be said, but nothing ever was. We couldn’t swap stories about how underwhelmed we were, about how we thought everything would somehow be different.

Being bitten—being changed—wasn’t something universal. It was definitely a becoming, a changing of everything—body, mind, spirit—couched with the unyielding knowledge that you will never belong again. You’ll never be
right
again. This was the chasm that divided me from lovers for a hundred years. It kept my breather best friend at arm’s distance and it kept me on my guard, constantly.

And it was exhausting.

“No. I was made by another pure vampire. That means that the person who changed you knew what they were doing. They bite, and while you hover in that state between life and death, you feed from the sire. It’s a circle.”

“Like the circle of life,” Pike said, picking up a French fry.

“More like the circle of death.”

I watched Pike eat his fry, then pause and look up at me. His eyes were serious. “Did it hurt?”

I blinked.

“You know, when it happened. Do you remember? I mean, we turn—become shifters when we hit puberty. Kind of stereotypical, you know, but that’s how it is. But I remember. We had a ceremony and a . . . kind of a party. I guess that really wasn’t the case with you.”

I thought about a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old Pike, celebrating his ascent into manhood, and bird-hood, I guess. I imagined him on some beautiful Hawaiian black sand beach with a clutch of family members whose dark, caramel-y skin mirrored his, all of them dancing, celebrating, exultant that Pike now shared the one characteristic that made him one of them—a familial tie that could never be severed.

“No.” I shook my head, surprised at how soft my voice had gotten. “There weren’t any parties. And yes . . . it hurt.”

“The pain didn’t last long, though. So I guess that’s the good thing.”

Pike pushed his hamburger and fries away, his voice low. “Then what happened? Maybe Wendi will do the same things you did after. Did you go home? Is there like—”

“Like did we all get in a V-formation and fly? Hold hands and sing AC/DC songs? No, that’s not how it works,” I snapped.

Pike looked hurt and I immediately felt bad. I wasn’t mad at him.

“Sorry, I just thought maybe we could get some insight.”

I reached out and laid my hand over his, the sheer warmth from his hand shooting goose bumps through me. The feeling was so foreign.

“I’m sorry, I’m just—just nervous is all. About finding Wendi. What did I do after?” I tugged at a lock of my hair and tried to pretend that I was thinking, trying to remember. But I never could forget.

The memory sickened me and I shook my head, the smell of Pike’s burger and the lifetime of restaurant grease pungent and nauseating. “Vampires don’t go home.”

Pike continued to pepper me with questions, each time revealing a bit more of himself and his story. I was surprised when the overhead lights clicked on in the restaurant and the darkness began to settle outside.

“Looks like it might be about time.”

Pike nodded. “Let’s go.”

Ruby was throbbing before we even opened the door. It was already packed, the music low but the bass still a chest-thundering thump. Pike pulled open the door and I stepped into the place, immediately wincing at the cacophony of sounds. There were the usual high-pitched squeals of almost-drunken girlfriends swilling cosmopolitans and mango-tinis, the low rumble of men more coifed than I was telling strange women how beautiful or mysterious they were while tinkling the ice in their gin and tonics, the roaring, overbearing laughter of a group of uncomfortable office drinking buddies clinking beer glasses to some success or other. Every sound was intense on its own, but massed together and echoed within the industrial-chic décor—shellacked cement floors bursting with bright swaths of Jackson Pollock-on-crack paint, slabs of reclaimed steel pounded into irregular (and therefore “stylishly upcycled”) bar tables, and walls covered in corrugated steel, polished to a gaudy shine—it was earsplitting.

My head was aching with the pulse and energy in the bar, and Pike’s cologne—which was faint to everyone else, I suppose—was choking me like I had chugged the entire bottle of eau de-whatever-the-heck-it-was. I pressed the back of my hand up against my nose, doing my best to blot out the cologne, the comingled scents of human bodies, and the acrid smells of mixed spirits and hops. It wasn’t working as Pike leaned into me, wiped a tear from the edge of my eye, and held it on his thumb.