“What did the vampire look like?” I asked.
He shrugged, but there was something sly in his eyes when he said, “Weren’t me what saw him.” He held out his hand.
Adam handed him an envelope. The goblin in human guise dropped the skateboard back on the ground and hopped on the battered and scarred surface. He didn’t stop it when it started to drift backward. He gave Adam a salute with the hand that held the white envelope, dropped a toe, and spun his board around to speed off into the night.
Three cars down from where Adam had parked there was a white Subaru Forester with California plates. I remember cars, a hazard of my job. I tugged Adam to a stop and examined it more carefully.
Subaru Foresters weren’t uncommon—there were three others in the parking lot. But I’d followed this one for miles last winter. I sniffed at the driver’s-side door and smelled a familiar vampire.
“Thomas Hao,” I said. I’d fought beside Thomas a couple of months ago, and we’d helped Marsilia destroy a nasty vampire. I wondered if Marsilia had known who he was when she turned him over to us this morning. I considered the goblin’s half lie about not being the one who saw the vampire and decided she did.
“This should be interesting,” said Adam after a moment, but he’d relaxed a little, and so had I.
Thomas Hao was the Master of San Francisco. That’s all I’d known about him the last time we met. But it turned out that he was something of an enigma, even by vampire standards. Like Blackwood, the vampire I’d helped kill in Spokane, Hao ruled without other vampires in his city. Unlike Blackwood, Hao was the opposite of crazy. He’d never had a large seethe, but a couple of years ago he’d shooed the few vampires he controlled out to other seethes and remained in San Francisco alone. No one knew why, though there were lots of stories about Thomas Hao, about what happened when someone made a move against him. I’d seen him hold off two very powerful, very old monsters all by himself.
There was no question that Thomas was a very dangerous vampire. But he was also a man of principle and logic, not driven by ambition. It wasn’t just me who thought so. As vampires went, Hao was almost a good man. I liked him.
It didn’t take long to find his room. We got on the elevator that smelled of him and hit every button on the way up. His room was on the top floor. We followed Thomas’s scent down the hall.
“There is a fae here, too,” I whispered. I’d first scented her downstairs, and her track followed Hao’s too closely for coincidence.
Adam nodded and knocked softly at the door where Thomas’s scent had led us. No need to bother the neighbors, and a vampire would hear us.
“A moment,” said Thomas’s voice. It would not have carried to human ears, so he wasn’t expecting room service.
The vampire opened the door and regarded us for a moment. He was dressed in a brown silk button-down shirt and black jeans. His feet were bare, and his hair was damp. I never had been able to read his face, but I could read his body language. Whoever he’d been expecting, it had not been us.
He was not a big man, but in vampires, that didn’t mean much. His hair was cut short and expensively. He smelled of the fae woman whose scent trail had paralleled his, as if he might have been touching her just before he answered the door.
He stepped back and gestured us in, closing the door behind us when we accepted his wordless invitation. His room was a suite with a pair of chairs and a couch in the living area and a view that, in the daylight, would be of the Columbia River. There was a door toward the back of the room, and it was shut.
“Please,” he said to us, “take a seat. May I get you some refreshments? If you do not enjoy alcohol, there is soda, I believe, as well as water.”
Polite vampire. It was a good thing that Adam and I had come, that we hadn’t sent a pair of werewolves who could have misread Thomas and tried to issue threats—assuming Thomas would have been polite to other werewolves.
“Water,” Adam said. “Thank you.”
Thomas looked at me. “Water is good for me, too,” I said. “Thank you.” We all had good manners here, yes, we did.
He served us the water and took a glass and filled it from an already opened bottle of red wine. He took a sip of wine and smiled politely. “To what do I owe this visit?”
“I’m afraid that is our question,” Adam replied.
“You were expecting Marsilia or Wulfe, right?” I asked.
“I called them when we got in,” he said. “And Wulfe assured me that someone would be over before long. I did not expect to see the Alpha of the Columbia Basin Pack and his wife running errands.”
Marsilia had known who was here all right.
“Errands,” said Adam thoughtfully.
None of us had taken a seat, I realized.