I signed up for a Krav Maga class at the Fillmore Community Center. I hadn’t gone yet, but it was all about baby steps. I rented three self-defense DVDs from the San Francisco Library and Netflixed the entire first season of Alias, kicking and jabbing in the living room. And I had even talked Vlad into giving me the occasional vamp-approved hand-to-hand combat course.
I wasn’t a black belt yet, but I was totally inching above complete imbecile.
“I need to head off to work,” I said, sweeping a rag over the counter. “Do you have plans? Maybe we could meet for lunch?”
Sampson smiled and for the first time since he showed up, he looked like his old, relaxed self. “This isn’t a vacation, Sophie. I’ve got to talk to some people, see what I can find out about the contract, about Feng and Xian.”
“What contract?”
“There’s a contract out on my life.”
I felt myself gape. “So we’re not only dealing with Xian and Feng, we’ve got the mob after you, too?”
“The contract is Xian and Feng’s.”
I crumpled up my rag and tossed it in my to-be-washed mountain. “I think Xian and Feng were pretty much kill-at-will.”
“They like people to believe that. But, technically, under UDA bylaws they have to be contracted or they’re considered rogue and enemies.”
I sat down hard. “Wait. You’re telling me UDA governs the Du family, too? What the hell?”
Sampson shrugged. “The Underworld is complicated.”
“Well yeah, obviously. But can’t the UDA just override Feng and Xian? Don’t you—or Dixon, or just the bylaws—override a stupid contract?”
“I appreciate your enthusiasm, but it’s not that easy. I’m just one man and the contract only pertains to me, to my life.”
“This has to enrage other demons, Sampson. Someone can just contract someone else and your life is over? That’s a travesty. It’s absolute crap. It’s un-American. We should protest. Or sue.” I thought of the late-night attorneys on TV, urging people to join their class-action lawsuits against asbestos poisoning and “vaginal mesh slings”—whatever those were—and even though I wanted to do everything I could to save this man, to make things right—I had a hard time imagining the same crooked lawyers imploring demons to call out the people who tried to kill them. “Or something.”
Sampson was already shaking his head, but I rattled on. “Can we just ask them to stop? We can tear up the contract!” I imagined myself then, leather clad, because anytime I imagine myself doing kick-ass things like tearing paper, I’m clad in leather, haughtily tearing and crumbling, throwing teensy-tiny nullified contract crumbs up into the air. Then I’d drink a scotch. “What do you think?”
The look on Sampson’s face was one of those sweet, sad ones a father gives his elementary school daughter when she says she’s going to marry SpongeBob when she grows up. “I wish it were that easy. These contracts aren’t paper bound and they aren’t as simple as pen and ink.”
I’ve been in the Underworld a long time, and although the Detection Agency runs on what seems like thousand-year old Word documents, I’d yet to see any contract come through that wasn’t “paper bound” or “pen-and-ink.” I licked my lips. “Like, written in the stars? In blood? On big stone tablets? We can still get it, ruin it, jackhammer it if we have to.” I’d skirted enough hard-hatted workers to have a pretty good idea what jackhammering entailed, but that sweet, sympathetic look in Sampson’s brown eyes said that even power tools were out of the question for this.
“The contract is bound by blood and flesh.”
I felt my own flesh crawl and my mouth quirked into an involuntary grimace. “Flesh?”
Sampson nodded solemnly and I considered a hunk of demon buttock squirreled away in some file cabinet somewhere. “How is that even possible?”
“You know that things in the Underworld don’t work the same way that things in the over world do.”
“But”—I pantomimed dumping a hunk of flesh on the table—“I don’t get it.” I was silent for a minute, considering. Then, with a slight brightening, “Should we just be looking for someone missing a hunk of flesh? Where do they take it from? Would he have, like, a hook for a hand, or one of those prosthetic limbs? Or”—that grimace again—“is that where the vaginal mesh sling comes in?”
Sampson cocked an eyebrow, his brow wrinkling. “Excuse me?”
It may have been a matter of afterlife or death, but I couldn’t believe I had just spewed the words “vaginal mesh sling” in front of my boss. A hot redness bloomed in my cheeks. “So, where does the flesh come from?” I asked again.
“It’s mine.”
“Yours?” My eyes immediately slipped over the length of Mr. Sampson, taking in every chiseled inch. His face and neck certainly weren’t missing any flesh and his button-up shirt didn’t seem to bow over any fleshless gaps. I tried not to look any lower.
“It was cut from me when I was in my werewolf form. In order for the contract—the hunters—to consider the contract bound, it must include flesh from the”—Sampson swallowed slowly, his Adam’s apple bobbing—“animal, and blood from the contractee.”