“—creatures of the night—”
Wait, wasn’t that a line from somewhere?
“—stalking the streets of Caldwell—”
Like the upstate New York version of The Walking Dead? When in doubt, drag a leg.
“—preying on victims—”
Okaaaaaaaaaaaay, moving on. Scrolling down the line-up, she randomly picked another. And yup, Verily, Barely Vlad was once again face-first in the camera—and this time he had a really good smoky eye going on.
“—are real! Vampires are real—”
Wonder if his pulpit was draped in black vel—okay, wow. That was supposed to be a joke, but as the lens pulled back, it did look like he was leaning on something that was, in fact, covered in black velvet.
Cutting that rant off, she went down to the next video, and told herself after this one, enough was enough. “Oh, hey, Vlad, wassup.”
“—testimonial about a vampire encounter.” Vlad turned to a guy sitting next to him in a plastic folding chair. Which was total ambiance right there. “Julio? Tell my fans about what happened to you two nights ago.”
Talk about mixing it up a little: Julio was the anti-vamp, what with a bandanna Tupac’d on his head, and his Jesus piece, and the tattoos up his throat.
His eyes, though … they were bugging and frenzied, all Vlad and then some.
“I was downtown, you know, with my boys, and we was…”
The story that came out started off as nothing special, just a gangbanger with his people, shooting up rivals in the alleys. But then things took a turn into Drac-landia, with the guy describing how he ran into an abandoned restaurant—and from there on, things got weird.
Assuming you believed him.
“—guy threw me up on the counter and he was all”—Julio did a hiss-and-claw—“and his teeth was all—”
“Like mine,” Vlad cut in.
“’cept his was real shit.” Okay, Vlad clearly did not appreciate that, but Julio was on a roll. “And he had a fucked-up face, his upper lip was all fucked up. And he was gonna kill me. He had a…”
Jo hung in for the rest of the interview, even through the part where Vlad all but pushed Julio out of the way, as if Dracu-wannabe’s sharing threshold had been reached.
Sitting back again, she wondered exactly how far she was going to go with this. And answered that one by heading over to the Caldwell Courier Journal site and doing a search on good ol’ Julio’s name. Huh. What do you know. There was an aritcle written the previous December on gang-related activity in the downtown area—and Julio was front and center in it. Even had a picture of him staring out of the back of a CPD patrol car, his eyes sporting that same stretched-wide thing, his mouth likewise cranked open like he was desperately talking to the photographer.
Nothing about vampires, though.
Scrolling up again, it turned out that the name on the byline was one she recognized.
Matter of fact, Bryant had gotten the guy and his wife a house about six months ago. Assuming she had it right.
A quick search in the client files and, yup, she was correct—
“I’m so sorry I’m late!”
Bryant Drumm came through the glass doors at a dead run, but he didn’t look frazzled. His dark hair was in perfect order, his gray-blue suit was closed at the jacket and the papers in his hands were separated into three sections.
So he hadn’t really rushed over. He’d been going at his own pace, even as she’d been rotting here.
He put his elbows on the desk and leaned in with his trademark smile. “Jo, how can I make it up to you?”
She held her hand out. “Gimme. And let me go home.”
Bryant put the papers in her palm, but then refused to let go when she tried to take them. “What would I do without you?”
As he stared down at her, his focus was locked on and complete—like nothing else existed in the world for him, like he was both captivated by her and slightly in awe. And to someone who hadn’t mattered much to her parents, who had been put up for adoption by the people who’d conceived her, who felt lost in the world … that was how he got her.
In a sad way that she didn’t like to dwell on much, she lived for these little moments. Stayed late for them. Kept plodding along in hopes it would happen again—
His phone rang. And he was still looking at her as he answered. “Hello? Oh, hey.”
Jo glanced away, and this time when she tugged, he let her have the contracts. She knew that tone of voice of his. It was one of his women.
“I can meet you now,” he murmured. “Where? Mmm-hmmm. No, I’ve already had dinner—but I’m up for dessert. Can’t wait.”
By the time he ended the call, she had turned to the side and fired up the scanner.
“Thanks again, Jo. I’ll see you tomorrow?”
Jo didn’t bother to look over her shoulder as she fed in the pages one by one. “I’ll be here.”
“Hey.”
“What?”
“Jo.” When she glanced back at him, he tilted his head to the side and narrowed his eyes. “You should wear that red more often. It looks good with your hair.”
“Thanks.”
Going back to the scanning, she listened to him leave, the door he went out of whispering shut. A moment later, there was the flare of a powerful engine and then he was gone.
With the knowledge that she was good and alone, she lifted her head and looked at her reflection in the glass entrance. The light from the inset fixtures above streamed down, hitting her hair in such a way that its red and brown tones stood out against the black and gray all around her.
For some reason, the emptiness in the office … in her life … seemed loud as a scream.
EIGHTEEN
The notes in Safe Place’s client files were all still handwritten. Part of it was cost; computers, and networks, and reliable storage were expensive, and with staffing as the priority, funds diverted in an IT direction were just not mission critical. But another part of it was the fact that Marissa, their fearless leader, was old-fashioned and didn’t really like things that were important kept in a form she couldn’t hold in her hands.
After all, if you were almost four hundred years old, the technology revolution of the last three decades was a blip on your radar screen.
Maybe a century from now the boss would trust the likes of Bill Gates a little more.
And it was kind of nice, Mary reflected. More human, somehow, to see the different handwritings, different inks, different ways people misspelled things from time to time. It was the visual equivalent of conversation, everyone bringing something unique to themselves to the records—as opposed to the entries being made up of uniform, spell-checked, all-the-same typed words.
It did, however, make searching for one particular reference or note more difficult. But then again, re-reading everything from the beginning helped you pick up on things you might have previously missed.
Like uncles, for example.
When there had been no mention of any next of kin on the original intake form, Mary had gone on to read each and every one of the progress notes in Annalye’s file, many of which were in her own handwriting. And just as she had remembered, the passages were invariably short and contained little of any use.
Bitty wasn’t the only one who had been quiet.
There wasn’t a single mention of a brother or any parents. And the female hadn’t spoken of her dead mate, either, or of the abuse that she and Bitty had been through. Which was not to say that the violence was undocumented. The medical notes for the two of them had been printed out and attached to the back cover of the file.