Aden (Vampires in America) (12 page)

Checking her calendar, she saw it was the eleventh of the month, and the slavers maintained a surprisingly strict schedule, for bloodsucking bottom feeders. The newest shipment of girls would have come in last night. They’d be penned up in one of several holding houses, awaiting the next online auction, which would be on the thirteenth. The number of women to be auctioned varied. It could be as few as five or as many as twenty. It just depended on the gleaners and how much
merchandise
they could round up. Sid’s problem would be determining which of the houses the women were being held in. If she could figure that out, she could do some recon and maybe gather enough evidence to take to the police. If she could only persuade them to conduct a raid while the women were still being held prisoner, they’d have no choice but to open a wider investigation. Granted, she’d brought the police evidence before, and they’d never moved on it. She suspected they’d been bought off, though she’d never been able to prove it. But she kept trying, and maybe this time her report would fall to someone who wasn’t in the slavers’ pay, someone who would follow up on her information.

And if that went against Aden’s preferences for keeping the human authorities out of it, then too bad. If he’d listened to her, it never would have come to this.

Sid settled down to work. Because the slavers were so organized in other things, she’d been working on a system for figuring out which house they’d use in any given month. It wasn’t perfect, but so far, she’d been right about sixty percent of the time. Eventually, her odds would go up, but with any luck they’d be shut down before that happened.

She’d calculated her best guess and was gathering her stuff for a little field trip when her phone rang. She almost didn’t answer, too focused on her plans for the afternoon to be interrupted, but then she caught Will’s name on the caller ID.

“Fuck,” she whispered. Was it Wednesday already? She briefly considered letting it go to voice mail, but decided that was just too cowardly, so she picked up the phone with a breathless, “Hi, Will.”

“Hey, sweetheart. Everything okay?”

“Yeah, sure, why?”

“You sound out of breath.”

“Oh, that. I dropped a file and was crawling around under my desk,” she explained, appalled at the ease with which the lie tripped off her tongue.

“Can we make it an early lunch today? I’ve got a meeting.”

It was the perfect excuse to cancel, but she couldn’t do it. She didn’t have many friends since moving to Chicago. Or rather, she had them, mostly from college, but they were spread all over the globe. Will was one of the few who always made an effort to stay in touch, something she herself was woefully remiss in. Besides, who knew? Maybe they
would
get married someday.

Sid contemplated that last thought and shook her head. Nope. She just couldn’t see herself settling into her mother’s routine for the rest of her life. And that’s what life with Will would be. Not a bad life, but not the one Sid wanted, either.

“You there, Sid?”

“Yeah, sorry. My brain took a short trip without me. Early lunch is fine. Where and when?”

“I reserved 11:30 at Naha. That work?”

Sid checked the time on her computer. It would be tight, but she could do it. And she’d still have plenty of time this afternoon to check out the slavers’ house.

“Works great. I’ll see you there.”

“Looking forward to it.”

She disconnected, smiling at Will’s sign-off. No brooding, alpha male bullshit from Will. He was beta all the way. Had she ever seen him angry? Did he ever
get
angry? He must, right? Everyone did eventually. She sighed and slumped back to her bedroom to change clothes. Ripped Levi’s and scuffed Chucks weren’t going to cut it at Naha.

SID TOOK A BIG bite of her Naha “famous” half-pound burger and chewed with great relish. She caught Will watching her with a lopsided grin.

“What?” she demanded.

“How a bitty thing like you manages to chow down the way you do—”

“First, I’m not a bitty thing. I’m nearly five-eight, as you well know. Second, no woman wants to be told she
chows down
. As for the rest of it, there’s no reason you couldn’t have ordered a burger if you’d wanted one, so stop looking at my lunch like a starving dog, and eat your damn halibut.”

“Testy. But I had steak yesterday, and I’m trying to cut back on red meat, now that I’m getting older.”

“Oh for God’s sake, you’re going to be thirty, not sixty. Get over it.”

“Wait ’til it’s your turn. Speaking of birthdays, I assume you’re heading home this weekend for your dad’s big bash?”

Sid blanked for a moment. Her father’s birthday party was
 . . .
oh, God,
this
weekend? She was mortified and feeling more than a little guilty that she’d forgotten.

“You forgot, didn’t you?”

“Of course not,” she insisted, thinking that she and Will knew each other entirely too well. “It’s on my calendar.”

“And you forgot anyway.”

“I’d have picked it up tomorrow. My alert’s set for two days before.”

“You have a present yet?”

“Bought it last month, Mister Know-It-All, so there.”

“Want to drive out there with me? I’m staying over at my parents’ ’til Sunday.”

Sid thought about the significance of that last part. It didn’t occur to either of them to stay in a hotel together, because there was no
passion
. Will would stay at his parents’ house, and, if she stayed over at all, it would be in her old room at
her
parents’ house. She found the reminder depressing.

“Sure,” she said to his invitation. At a minimum, he’d be good company for the drive, and if it turned out she didn’t want to stay over, she could always take the train back.

“Good deal. I’ll pick you up around ten. Gives you time to get gorgeous before the party.”

“Mmm,” Sid agreed, but her mind was hung up on the unfairness of it all. That a smug, chauvinist bastard of a vampire could rock her world, while a great guy like Will was relegated to the friends department. What did that say about her? Nothing good, that was for sure.

Will’s cell phone vibrated discreetly. He stole a glance at it and signaled the waiter for the check.

“Hope you don’t mind, Sid. But I can’t be late for this meeting.”

“Of course not.”

“Your brother said to say
hi,
by the way.”

“Tell him
hi
back.” Her oldest brother, Jameson Reid III, was Will’s best friend and a partner at the same law firm. Which was why Will saw her brother far more often than Sid did. She’d come by her obsessive work ethic naturally. It ran in the family.

Ten minutes later, Will gave her a brotherly kiss good-bye and slipped into a cab.

“You sure you don’t want to share?” he asked, before closing the door.

Sid shook her head. “It’s the opposite direction, and I don’t want you to be late. I’ll take the next one.”

“See you Saturday morning, then.”

She watched the cab carry him away, staring at the traffic until the doorman drew her attention with a polite, “Do you required a cab, miss?”

Sid regarded him blankly, considering. She felt like walking, but it was already late, and she’d have to take the train to her destination later. “Yes, please. Thank you.”

The cab ride was longer than she’d hoped. She’d forgotten how bad lunchtime traffic could be and could probably have walked faster. But it was too late for that. She rushed into the elevator and down the hall, kicking off her heels as she walked into her condo, pulling off her black cashmere sweater and charcoal pencil skirt and tossing them on the bed. She took the time to wash her face of makeup and confine her hair in a long braid, but before she got dressed, she added something she only wore during these nighttime recons of hers, and that was a bellyband holster along with a 9mm Glock 26 Gen4 with a ten capacity mag.

Sid wasn’t all that fond of guns and had never fired one before moving to Chicago. But she
was
fond of her life, and some of the places she’d had to venture in pursuit of this story were unsavory at best and flat-out dangerous at worst. She hadn’t really taken the danger seriously before Janey had been killed, but afterwards, one of the first things she’d done was buy a gun and learn how to shoot it. She now went to the range every week and fired a couple hundred rounds. Her first few times there had been laughable. She’d flinched so hard, she’d barely hit the target. But she’d stuck with it, and now, while she’d never be a sharpshooter, she was confident she could at least hold her own long enough to get away. Unless her enemy was a vampire. But in that case, she figured nothing would save her anyway.

She racked the slide, putting a round in the chamber, then dropped the magazine and filled it, giving her a total of eleven rounds. She replaced the mag with a hard slap, just as she’d been taught, then slipped it into the bellyband. Once she’d yanked on her clothes—a pair of torn jeans, a heavy, long-sleeved T-shirt, and a dark gray fleece hoodie, along with the black Chucks she’d had on earlier—the small 9mm was undetectable to anything but a pat-down.

Other than the gun, she didn’t take much with her on these recon forays. A notebook and pen, her ID and transit pass, and enough money for a cab, just in case, plus a small bottle of water and an energy bar. Experience had taught her that she could sometimes be stuck somewhere a long time, unable to move without giving her position away. She shoved it all into a small backpack, then checked the time again. Nearly 2:00 P.M. It was later than she liked, but there was still plenty of time.

She’d discovered early on that her best chances for sneaking up on the holding pens was during the day when the vamps were sound asleep. They hired human guards, but the humans had clearly been told that their job was to keep the women
in
rather than everyone else
out
, so they paid very little attention to what was happening on their own perimeter.

Besides, Sid had become quite proficient at blending into her environment. She could put on a sexy dress and high heels to seduce Aden, or she could pull on a pair of raggedy jeans and some scuffed Chucks to become just another teenager making her way in a rough neighborhood. She took the train, tucking her braid of red hair down the back of her sweatshirt, pulling up the hood, and adding a baseball cap to better conceal herself before disembarking. She’d been enough of a thorn in the slavers’ sides that at least some of them would know her on sight.

The house she was headed to was in Woodlawn not far from Jackson Park, and only a short distance from Lake Michigan. She actually knew of at least one shipment of slaves that had been moved by boat. She didn’t know where they’d gone after that, because she’d had little luck tracking any of the captive women beyond Chicago. She only knew for sure that her suppositions about the extended network were correct because of Janey’s personal experience.

Keeping her head down as she got off the train, Sid made her way to the street she needed. Her target was a fifties era, single-story house, with a broad, covered porch. She walked by the first time without slowing, continued down two full blocks, then crossed the street and did a second pass on the opposite side of the street. Most of the houses in this neighborhood had been replaced by large apartment buildings, which was a bit of good luck. She couldn’t hang around too long without the wrong people noticing her, but there was enough tenant turnover in the surrounding apartments that it gave her a little bit of cover.

Her initial walk-by told her the house she wanted was being guarded by two thuggish-looking guys. They didn’t do much, just sat on the porch, chairs kicked back, and watched the street. It said something about the neighborhood that no one gave them a second look, even though they were obviously armed and didn’t try to hide it. Holding her cell phone and pretending to carry on a conversation, she snapped several pictures of the guards, including a few that zoomed in on their guns, just for the record. Illinois had some of the strictest gun laws in the country, but that didn’t mean no one ever broke them. The police would be no more interested in the guns than the neighbors were, which meant not at all.