“What exactly do you want to know about the article?”
As she met Bill’s narrowed eyes, everyone and everything else in the café disappeared; the sounds of hissing steam and brewing coffee, the chatter, the comings and goings, all of it went on the dim. And not because the two of them were sharing a romantic moment.
“Are you aware of the YouTube video Julio’s been in?” Jo asked. “And what he said?”
Bill looked away. “You know, I think I will get that latte.”
The reporter got up and went to the counter. When he was addressed by name, and a, “Would you like the usual?” she wondered whether it was true that all writers were powered by caffeine.
And it was weird, this place wasn’t near his work or his new house. Maybe he’d lived in the area before?
Bill returned with a tall mug that was more beer stein than anything you’d put a latte in, and as he sat down again, she could tell he’d taken the time to get his head back on straight.
“You’ve seen the videos,” she said.
The man shook his head slowly. “I interviewed Julio when he got out on bail, as part of a series on the upswing of gang-related violence downtown. Most of those kinds of kids—and he was just a kid … is one, I mean—a lot of them don’t say a thing when they’re approached. And if they do talk? It’s a lot of posturing about territory, their version of an honor code, their enemies. Julio wasn’t interested in any of that. He just kept going on about…”
“A vampire.” For some reason, her heart started pounding. “That’s what he was focused on, wasn’t he.”
“Yeah.”
“You didn’t mention anything like that in your article, though.”
“God, no. I don’t want my editor to think I’m nuts—but I did go online, and I saw the videos. Spent about three days doing nothing but watching those things all night long. My wife was convinced I’d lost my mind. Seventy-two hours later, I wasn’t too sure I hadn’t.”
Jo leaned in, her elbow pushing her ’cino forward until she had to keep it from falling to the floor. “Look … what are the chances that Julio saw something? And can I just take this moment to say, I cannot believe I’m asking that at all.”
Bill shrugged and tried out his latte. As he set the tall mug back down, he shook his head some more. “I thought it was crazy at first, too. I mean, I’m into facts—that’s the reason I wanted to be a journalist even though it’s a dying field. But after I saw everything that’s been posted? It’s just … there’s an awful lot of stuff about encounters like that happening in Caldwell. If you audit similar content, even on a cursory level, across the U.S., it’s astonishing how so much of it focuses right here in the five-one-eight. Yeah, sure, you get your garden-variety crazies all over the place, like ghost hunters and whatnot. But when it comes to vampires specifically, it’s like…” He laughed and looked at her. “Sorry, I’m going off the rails.”
“No, you aren’t.”
“Feels like it.” He took another draw of his brew. “Why do you ask?”
Jo shrugged. “The night before last, a friend of mine thought he saw something. He managed to get it on video and put it up online … but what he said happened is totally impossible, and there were drugs involved on his part. He took me out to this abandoned girls’ school—”
“Brownswick?”
“Yes, that’s the one.” Jo rubbed her nose even though it didn’t itch. “He took me out there in the morning to show me the leftovers of some kind of big fight or something. There weren’t any … at least, not exactly. And I wasn’t going to waste any more time on it, but I was bored at work last night—I went online, did a little poking around—kind of what you did. And that’s how I found Julio’s stuff.”
Bill cursed. “I shouldn’t ask this…”
“Do you want to see the footage?”
“Damn it.”
As Bill went quiet, Jo sat back and let the man decide for himself. And she knew exactly how he felt. She wasn’t into the dark side or people pretending that one existed.
The trouble was, she couldn’t quite let this all go.
“Lemme see,” he muttered.
Jo got out her phone, located the video, and turned the little screen around. As he took her cell and watched Dougie’s clip, she tracked the flickering of his facial muscles.
When it was done, he handed her iPhone back. Then he checked his watch. After a moment, he asked, “You want to go for a ride over there?”
“Yes,” she said, getting to her feet. “I do.”
Mary was determined to be careful with her words.
As she waited for Rhage to arrive at Safe Place, she paced around the front living room, dodging the cozy couches and stuffed chairs, straightening a framed pencil drawing by one of the kids, pulling the curtains back from time to time even though her hellren was going to text her when he got there.
In spite of the fact that she was alone by all conventional definition, her head was crowded with nouns and verbs, adjectives, adverbs.
And yet even with a countless array of word combinations at her disposal, she remained stuck in tabula rasa land.
The trouble was that she was looking to avoid another disaster like what had happened at Havers’s clinic, and unfortunately, you couldn’t always tell where the land mines were. And what she was going to have to tell Bitty was not—
“Ms. Luce?”
Turning from the window, she forced herself to smile at the girl. “You’ve come down.”
“I don’t understand why we’re waiting.”
“Could you come here for a minute?”
The little girl had on the ugliest black coat you’d ever seen. It was two sizes too big, under-stuffed with down feathers, and molting at the various seams, tufts of white and gray escaping around the stitching. Clearly, the thing had been made in the boys-aged-twelve-to-fifteen vein, and yet Bitty had refused a new one, even though there were coats both new and donated to choose from in all kinds of colors and styles in the back hall.
A sense of exhaustion weighed Mary down, like someone had sneaked up behind her with some chain mail and draped her shoulders in the stuff: the kid wouldn’t even accept a toy or a frickin’ coat … and Mary thought there was a chance in hell she could get Bitty to open up in the slightest? About the most traumatic events in her life?
Good luck with that.
“Sit down,” Mary instructed, pointing at a chair. “I need to talk to you.”
“But you said we were allowed to go?”
“Sit down.” Okay, maybe she needed to work on her tone. But she was so frustrated with the situation she was ready to scream. “Thank you.”
As Bitty looked at her from the armchair, Mary gave up sugarcoating anything. Not because she wanted to be cruel, but because there was no other way to phrase these things.
“We can go to your old house.”
“I know, you told me.”
“But we’re not going alone.” As Bitty looked as though she were going to throw out a why, Mary talked over any protest. “It’s just not safe. We are responsible for your well-being, and the two of us going out alone to a property that has been abandoned in a human part of town for quite some time is simply not going to happen. That is non-negotiable.”
Mary braced herself for an argument.
“All right,” was what came back at her.
“It’s my hellren.” At that very moment, her phone let out a bing! “And he’s here.”
Bitty just sat in that armchair, with its flower-print fabric and the knit throw hung over its back and the long-necked lamp that peered over one side as if the thing were checking to make sure any inhabitants were okay.
“He’s a member of the Black Dagger Brotherhood, and I would trust him with my life. And yours.” Mary wanted to go over, kneel down, take the girl’s hand. She stayed put. “He’s going to drive us there and bring us back.”
And he’d already been out to check the house.