chapter 16
“Man, I’ve always wanted to stay here,” Obi said as I pushed open the door to Room 1601 of the Waldorf=Astoria Hotel.
I had too, which is why I had decided to use the blank card Dante had given me to create a simulacrum of one of my mother’s credit cards. They had put the card on file at the front desk, but I had paid for the room with my remaining cash. After all, it wasn’t stealing if nothing got charged to it, right?
The suite itself was as magnificent as I had always imagined it would be, the large living area home to a fancy nineteenth century sofa and loveseat, some expensive looking ornate wood furniture and a big flat screen television. The bedroom was just as large, fitting a huge dresser and a king size bed covered in finery. The marble bathroom rounded out the opulence, and it was easy to picture myself as someone important like a movie star, or royalty. I laughed at the irony.
“What’s funny?” Rebecca asked. We were standing in the bedroom together, having left Obi watching television on the other side of the door.
“I was just thinking about being someone important like an actor,” I said. I looked at her. The daytime stroll hadn’t done her any favors. No amount of damage could undo her nascent beauty, but she looked ragged and tired. “How are you feeling?”
She was tentative in her reply. “I have a small problem,” she said.
I looked over to the windows. There was a fair amount of light coming in, but I hadn’t pulled the heavy drapes closed yet.
“Not dark enough?” I asked.
She smiled, but it wasn’t a positive smile. She looked anxious and uncomfortable. “Between the sun and the water, and I haven’t been home in almost three days,” she looked down at the floor, embarrassed. “I’m hungry.”
I felt like an idiot. I had forgotten about her dietary needs. Maybe the thought of her dining should have turned my stomach, but I had seen so much worse in the last twenty-four hours. Besides, I needed her far more than the world needed another pimp or gangbanger. I went over to the windows and pulled the drapes closed, making sure it was nice and dark.
“Just lay down for awhile,” I told her. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.” I leaned in to kiss her on the cheek. It was colder than usual. “It shouldn’t take me too long to find somebody the world won’t miss.”
She lifted her head. There were tears in her perfect blue eyes. “You’re sweet, but there isn’t enough time,” she said. “I’ve taken too much of a beating the last few days. You’re not exactly Gandhi you know.”
“Okay, how about if I grab the bellhop?” It was intended as a joke, but the blunt truth was that if it came down to it I would have if she had asked. What she did ask for was easier to live with, but harder to acquiesce to.
“Landon, I don’t want to ask you to do this but... you’re a diuscrucis. Whatever I took, you’d regenerate.” Her eyes pleaded with me.
“You said my blood could be poison to you,” I reminded her. I wanted to help her, but the idea of anybody sucking up my life force was giving me the creepy crawlies.
“I have to risk it,” she said. “I don’t want you to kill an innocent person because of me. ”
I took a few steps back from her. “Just give me a second,” I said.
I had already been shot, stabbed, torn apart, and fallen from the fifty-something-ith story of a skyscraper. It was just the concept of it that was frightening me. I had seen enough vampire movies to be influenced, and I was being stupid. The only one who could be harmed was Rebecca, and she was as good as gone if I didn’t agree to it. Seeing her standing there, her skin dry, her hair dull, her eyes wet with tears, there was no way I wouldn’t do it.
I rushed forward, wrapped her up in my arms, pulled her head into my neck and closed my eyes. I felt the warmth of her breath on my skin, and then the soft touch of her incisors as she bit into me.
I had expected it to hurt, but it didn’t cause any pain at all. The feeling was more of a euphoria, a strange emotional high. I could feel her mouth moving against my neck, and I could feel my body reacting as if we were engaged in more intimate activity. My heart was racing, my eyes blurred, and a million colors swam and danced in front of me, distracting me from the act.
All too soon, it was done. She pulled away from me, holding me up as I came off of the vampiric high and was left breathless and weak. Rebecca put me down on the bed, and then lay down on her side facing me. I stared at the ceiling for a few minutes while my body began to regenerate.
“Thank you,” she said. She reached over and stroked my hair. “You don’t know how much it means to me that you did this.”
I turned my head. She looked healthy, radiant even. Her eyes were a cold blue fire, her lips redder and fuller, her skin smooth, silky, and shimmering as though she were covered in glitter. I had never seen anything like it. No human could ever hope to be as amazingly attractive.
“Chocolate or garlic?” I asked her.
She ran her tongue along her lips, tasting whatever leftovers remained there. “Better than chocolate,” she replied. “I’ve never felt like this before.”
“Me neither.” I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. My entire body was warm and tingling. With my eyes closed, I could still see residual ribbons of color like an aurora borealis in my brain.
“Are you okay?”
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “I just need a few minutes to recover. Did you get enough?”
“Right now I feel like I’ll never need to feed again. If word got out about the potency of your blood, you’d have every vampire on the planet hunting you down for a taste.”
“You mean I don’t already?”
She laughed. “Good point.”
She slid closer to me and put her head on my shoulder and her arm over my chest. I reached around and held her to me. Such a simple closeness, but it felt so perfect. We sat together for a while, just enjoying the moment of quiet. When I heard Rebecca’s breathing deepen, I carefully extracted myself and snuck out of the bedroom.
Obi was stretched out on the sofa, still watching television. When I slipped into the room, he sat up and turned it off.
“I was worried you weren’t going to make it out of there,” he said with a laugh.
I reached up and ran my hand over my neck. The bite marks had already healed over. “We’re just friends,” I told him.
Weren’t we? I hadn’t had time to give it much thought. She was beautiful, and I was attracted to her, but it was a lot more complicated than that, her impending death match with her father not withstanding.
“It’s none of my business anyway,” he said, sitting up and turning of the TV. “The Exchange is a mess because of you,” he continued. “After your little event at the soiree, most of the biggest dealers have gone to ground. They know we’ve been eavesdropping, and they’re afraid of becoming your next target.”
“They thought I was there to take down Merov?” I asked. That was better than I could have hoped for. We didn’t need word getting back to the Demon Queen that I was after the Chalice.
“Yup, but there’s more.” His smile was huge. “They think the only reason anybody got out alive was because Reyzl showed up. They’re scared bloodless of you. Hell, after what I saw today, so am I.”
I hadn’t thought about the positive effect I could have had if I had gone after the vampires. Dante had given me a goal, but maybe there were other opportunities that I wasn’t considering.
“So the Exchange isn’t producing much info anymore,” I said. “Tell me you found another source.”
“Who knew that demons were so into computers?” he said. “There’s another site, it’s a Freenet image board. They upload pics with the messages encrypted in the byte code. Nasty stuff. Nothing you’d ever want to have to look at.” His smile faded and he looked distracted. “But yeah, anyway I had some samples on the iPad, but they took it. I didn’t get a chance to crack the encryption.”
“It’s okay if you don’t want to go any deeper into that stuff,” I said. I was already sorry for whatever it was he had seen.
“Don’t sweat it man. I want to crack that code so we can find those a*sholes and I can watch you rip their twisted heads off.”
“I have another task for you, if you’re up to it. It’s something a little more clandestine. Merov’s apartment.”
“What about it?” he asked.
“We need to get back in, and we need to break into his office. It’s got some kind of fingerprint security system, but it’s not his fingerprint. He keeps a sliver of the prior owner’s finger in a case so he can get by. I think our lead on the Chalice is somewhere in that room. “
“Man, you had to swan dive fifty stories to get out of there, and now you want to go back in?” He shook his head. “Wait a second. You said we.”
“I need you to come with. If Merov has a computer, and I’m sure he does, you’re going to need to be there to hack it.”
Obi tapped his fingers on the coffee table while he thought about it. “So, you need me to try to figure out what kind of security he’s using, come up with a way to circumvent it, and then hack his computer. Is that about right?”
“A blueprint of the building might come in handy too,” I said. “I can’t take you out the window.”
“I’m starting to rethink my pledge of service,” he said.
“Sorry Obi, you can’t unbend the knee.”
Obi stood up and headed for the door, grabbing his gun on the way by and tucking it into the back of his jeans. “I’ll be at the library, doing some research,” he said. He motioned towards the bedroom door with his head. “Try not to have too much fun while I’m gone.”
He laughed when my face reddened, and left before I could stammer on about how it wasn’t like that, we were just friends, and we had business to take care of. Just thinking about the vampire girl sleeping in the bed on the other side of the door drove me to distraction. I had something else I wanted to take care of, so I scribbled out a quick note to Rebecca and slid it under the door.