Once Bitten, Twice Shy (23 page)

"Like a chimney sweep. You dust vamps and get rid of the ashes. Dust people too, I'm betting," she said, nodding wisely, like an old Chinese monk.

I accepted her metaphor, despite her ignorance of what actually happens when a vamp goes bye-bye for good. "Yes," I said, "I do." I let her see in my eyes what all my victims had seen in their time. She was already a tough old bird, though I wouldn't put her age past 22, but I backed her up a step. "Someday you might even be as good as me, if a vamp doesn't rip your throat out first. Of course, Junior there might not appreciate that." I motioned to her belly. "There are Moms, and there are Sweeps, Amy Jo. You can't be both."

I stopped, mentally kicking myself for falling into lecture mode. Either she was smart enough to figure it out for herself, or she was too damn dumb to waste my breath on.

"Throw the room key on the bed," I told Rudy, too tired to be polite anymore. He fished the card out of his back pocket and laid it on Vayl's crumpled comforter.

"We'll be taking the stairs down." I motioned them out of the bedroom. "You come too," I told Bergman when he caught my eye.

He nearly leaped out of our way as we moved to the entry way, a nervous gazelle smelling predator in all directions. To give him credit, however, he didn't rush to his ride once we reached the parking lot. He stood slightly behind me as Rudy and Amy Jo boarded their beige Chevy Van, circa 1975, and pulled away. Even from a distance I could see Amy Jo talking into her cell phone, hopefully reporting Vayl's final demise.

"Come on, Bergman, lets get you that blood sample so you can get the hell out of here."

"So Vayl's okay?" he asked as we took the elevator back upstairs.

"Of course. If you've taught me anything, it's to be perfectly paranoid when it comes to securing sleeping quarters. He's snoozing in the basement."

"What're you going to do now? I mean, now that the bad guys know where you're staying?"

I shook my head as we exited the elevator and reentered the suite. Trashed by trailer trash. How poetic. I started picking up junk and throwing it into a pile. "Find the one place in Miami that won't show up on these jerks' radar." Bergman frowned heavily as he helped me clean up. After a few minutes he squared his shoulders and said, "I know just the place."

"You do?"

"Yeah. Actually, I'm staying there."

I swallowed my spit and it went down the wrong tube. Through the coughing fit that followed I said, "Are you… inviting us to stay with you?"

Bergman nodded unhappily. "I figure it's the patriotic thing to do."

"You figure rightly. Thanks!"

Boy would Vayl's jaw drop when he heard this one. Bergman's privacy, sacred to him as the Torah, had bowed to the needs of two of the Agency's most notorious members, I'd have to choose the right time to tell him. Definitely
after
he'd climbed off the top of the toilet paper cabinet upon which he now roosted.

After our little confrontation the evening before, I'd expected him to complain when I'd stomped into his room and demanded that he change sleeping quarters so I could leave him during the day without worrying. But he'd just shrugged, grabbed a pillow and followed me to the darkest corner I could find. I'd covered him with a tarp and disguised the lump he made by placing a row of paint cans along the top edge of the cabinet.

"Sorry," I'd said as I'd turned to leave, knowing he was laying in enough mildew to start a spoor factory.

"It is fine," I heard him say, "there is little a hot shower cannot cure."

What a guy. Too bad he'd been mostly dead for centuries.

Bergman and I sat on a couple of overturned five gallon buckets in the basement of Diamond Suites, waiting for night to fall. Any minute now Vayl would stir, and he probably wouldn't appreciate the audience, but Bergman's unspoken sense of urgency had rubbed off on me. We really needed to get out, before Aidyn and Liliana caught onto our scam and resorted to something more dependable than southern-fried assassins. Like a bomb.

The last vestige of light left the basement. Yeah, creepy. Bergman and I flicked on our flashlights. Somehow that made it worse. And it was no consolation to know there really could be monsters hiding in the shadows between the boiler and the storage closets. I'd been eyeing the edges of Freakoutland for maybe a minute when I heard a huge, gasping gulp that made me jump up and overturn my bucket despite the fact that I'd been expecting it. When the muttering started, however, I relaxed. The Vayl-shaped plastic on top of the cabinet in the furthest corner of the basement creaked as he started to move, his complaints getting louder as he remembered where he was. With our flashlights trained on his location, we were mesmerized by the sight of a vamp dressed in blue plastic. We watched him struggle to escape seemingly endless yards of tarp while paint cans dropped off the cabinet's edge like gumballs from a faulty machine. Still enmeshed from the knees down, Vayl flopped off the cabinet before we realized he needed a hand down, falling fast and hard like a penguin who hasn't bought the whole flightless scenario. Somehow he recovered, so quickly his movements were a dizzying blur, and landed on his feet.

"What are you doing here?" he grumbled, giving Bergman a slight nod to acknowledge his arrival.

"Waiting for you," I replied. "Need some coffee, do you?"

"No." He looked pointedly at my neck and, this is embarrassing, but I'm pretty sure I blushed. Nonetheless, I barreled on.

"Bergman needs a day to find you a willing donor—"

"I told you, I can find my own donors," he snapped. He took a minute to regroup. "I am sorry. Waking is never pleasant for me. What I meant to say…" he stopped, took inward stock and started over, "What I now realize is that I do not need any donors, not tonight anyway. I woke with the same longing as ever, but without the need. Last night… the blood I took last night was more… potent… than I realized."

I cleared my throat. What do you say when you find out your blood is
really
filling?
It's not a manwich, it's a meal! Nope, not going there
. "Um, we need to get out of here as soon as possible." I gave Vayl the short version of Rudy and Amy Jo's adventures and my distraction theory. I also told him about my visit with Cassandra. His immobile face registered actual shock when I mentioned the Tor-al-Degan.

"So you've heard of this thing?" I asked.

"I have. I do not know how it was vanquished the last time someone brought it forth, but I know many died trying."

"Well, look, Assan's goon said there was a ceremony tomorrow that seemed to involve the Tor-al-Degan, Assan, the senator, and possibly Aidyn. If we're lucky the Raptor will show up too and we can bowl a strike." I went on, "I figure we eliminate Assan tonight after we get the details we need to crash their party and," like the hero and heroine in a really fine melodrama, "foil their plans."

"I agree. But we must anticipate what other distractions they may throw at us to keep us from accomplishing that."

Right on cue, my phone rang. It was Cole. "Lucille? My building's on fire! The pictures, they're burning!"

"Where are you?"

"Here! With the fire trucks!"

Holy crap
! "Listen! It's not an accident! Assan is onto you! Look around, do you see any of his men?"

"No. I don't know. It's… there are dark patches here and there. They could be hiding."

Through the phone I heard an explosive, popping noise. "Cole? What's that?"

"The windows just exploded! Oh my God, my business!"

"We'll work it out for you, Cole. But right now, you need to run—"

"Hey! What're you doing! Let me go!"

"
Cole
, tell me—"

"Lucille! They've—" the phone went dead.

I shoved it into my pocket and jumped up. "Assan has Cole!"

Vayl laid a hand on my shoulder, probably to keep me from sprinting off into the night like some mad cross country runner. "We will get him back. Tonight. But we need to get Cassandra too. She is the only other person who has had contact with us. They may know about her. They may use her as the next distraction."

I wanted to say something stupid like, "But she's not on the way." I held my tongue. Vayl was right. "I should call her, though. So she'll be ready to go when we come."

"I imagine she already knows."

Bergman and I had already packed everything that could be salvaged into the van. The Mercedes would stay put until the dealer came for it at the end of the week. We didn't exactly tear out of the parking lot, but we wasted no time in hitting the road. Bergman drove while Vayl and I sat in the bucket seats behind him, our legs pinned between boxes and trunks. Naturally, since I wasn't driving, traffic cooperated.

"I am sorry," Vayl said, his voice low in my ear, "I know you cherish your privacy, but your emotions are shooting out of you like fireworks. You have every right to be scared and worried, but you cannot let those feelings take you over. Not tonight."

A spurt of anger made me want to slap him, as if I was some diva who didn't get the Double Stuff Oreos she'd demanded before her concert. I took a deep breath, and then another. "Okay, reign it in. I understand. I will."

Cassandra waited for us on the curb in front of her store, two bags in hand, two on the sidewalk beside her. Even after everything I'd seen and done in my life, the Midwesterner in me thought,
Wow, that's just weird
. But weird in a way I deeply appreciated.

Bergman helped her load her stuff, giving Vayl and I each a bag to hold on our laps. She kept the other two, tucking one beneath her feet and keeping the other in-hand.

"No speeding," I told Bergman as he settled back behind the wheel. "You hit a bump going over 60 and your exhaust system is going to snap off like a Lego."

"I know, I know, I packed too much. I always do."

He sounded so contrite I backed off. "You wouldn't have brought it if you didn't need it."

"That's why I like you, Jaz. You never sneer at my craziness."

"If you could watch a film of my childhood you'd know why."

He chuckled, the way a person will who's had similar suspicions about insanity in the family. "Where to now?"

I looked at Vayl. "Bergman's offered us asylum. We get to stay on his turf as long as we make our beds and put our dirty plates in the dishwasher."

"Excellent. Take us there, if you please." Vayl looked at Cassandra then. "It is good to see you again."

"Likewise." She looked at me and smiled. "Hello Lucille. Or should I call you Jaz?"

"Why don't we stick with Lucille? The less you know about me the better."

"But that is why I'm here."

"Really?"

She held my gaze, her eyes like twin wells in the dim light. I nearly kicked in my night sight, but I wasn't sure I wanted to see her that clearly. "When we shook hands, the vision of David came strongest," she told me. "But another vision crept in, like a shadow, and I could not understand what it meant. So after you left I consulted the Enkyklios."

Vayl nodded as if he knew what that meant, which irritated me. Or maybe it was the fact that Cassandra felt free to nose around my psyche.

"What's an Enkyklios?" I asked, the suspicion in my voice causing Bergman to flash me a look of approval.

Cassandra slipped into lecture mode. "An Enkyklios is like a metaphysical library. It is full of the information Seers have whispered to their descendents practically since the beginning of time. For the last several generations we have taken it upon ourselves to travel the world, gathering and storing that information so it won't be lost forever."

"We?" asked Bergman. "Who's we?"

"An international guild I belong to called Sisters of the Second Sight."

"Never heard of it." He sounded as snappish and impatient as I felt.

"No," Cassandra smiled sweetly, "you wouldn't have."

I cut to the chase before Bergman came up with a conspiracy theory even Julia Roberts wouldn't buy. "So what did you find in the library?"

She looked down, hiding her eyes from me.
Uh-oh
. "I think you need to see it for yourself when we get to a safe place."

I sat back in my seat and sighed. Then I felt Vayl's cool hand wrap around my own.

"What are you afraid of?" he murmured, quiet in my ear so no one could overhear.

I whispered right back. "She's going to tell me my dad's a demon and my mom was a harpy. She's going to uncover the fact that I'm a monster. I don't guess I'll be surprised to hear it. I've always known at some level. After all, it takes a certain kind of someone to be capable of assassination. You just hate to have your worst traits confirmed by a panel of independent judges, you know?"

I felt Vayl shrug. "I think your perspective is tainted. But if you insist on looking at it that way, is it so bad to be our kind of monster? Look at the evil we have averted in our time together." He squeezed my hand. "As long as you do not corrupt any monks or paint eyelashes on the Venus de Milo, I would say you have nothing to worry about."

Nothing to worry about. Nothing… nothing… nothing.

Bergman pulled into the circle drive in front of his hideaway as Vayl and I gaped at the view out the van's front window. Tastefully lit by low wattage lamps and a couple of well placed spots, the beachfront two-story looked like it would've been just as comfortable on Cape Cod. The landscaping, the wraparound porch, the white wicker furniture for cripe's sake, it might've come from the latest issue of Better Homes & Gardens.

"
This
is
your
safe house?" I asked Bergman.

"Yeah. Why not?" I waited to reply until he got out and opened the side door.

"Well," I said, as Vayl and I handed him Cassandra's luggage, "it's just so… pleasant." I got out, grabbed a box and followed him to the front door. "I'd always imagined you in a cave. Or, at the very least, one of those rickety old mansions with droopy shutters and more tunnels than windows."

"I prefer a really excellent security system." He put the bags down, lifted the lion's head doorknocker, and thumbed a switch underneath it. The lion's head slid sideways, revealing a square of metal and electronics that took detailed measurements of Bergman's left eye before deciding he passed muster. The door clicked several times and stopped.