Chapter 2

TURNS OUT, I didn’t have anything to worry about. The only thievery was the restaurant’s charge for drinks. Sabrina attacked her shrimp tacos like Greg used to go after Chinese buffets in our college days, and I knocked back margaritas like a frat boy on spring break. It takes a lot of booze to give a vampire a buzz, and I desperately needed some liquid fortification to get me through the silence of dinner.

My reason for getting liquored up sat across from me. Detective Sean Fitzpatrick, my girlfriend’s new partner and our uninvited, unwanted, and definitely unappreciated dinner guest. Fitz, as he insisted we call him, was a new transfer from Colorado, and he was so damn happy to be living somewhere with affordable housing, cheap taxes, and sunshine, that he was completely irrepressible. I’d never met many people from the Rocky Mountains, but Sean was by far the most cheerful. He might have been the happiest person I’d ever met. Period. I hate cheerful.

“. . . so I say to the guy, ‘What did you think was going to happen? You bring out ice cubes with eyeballs in them for Halloween and nobody calls the cops?’” He roared with laughter loud enough to make the people two tables over shoot us a nasty look. Again. Empty tables circled us in a packed restaurant. No matter how many times the hostess sat someone within earshot of Fitzpatrick, five minutes later they were asking for a new place to eat.

Sean wasn’t a terrible guy; he just had no internal volume control and a litany of horrific stories from working the mean streets of Denver. I drink blood to stay alive, and he had grossed me out at least twice since their entrees arrived. Sabrina somehow managed to tune him out enough to eat. I couldn’t consume solid food anymore, but I was impressed at the speed with which Fitz shoved chicken molé down his scrawny gullet.

“So, how did you guys meet? You bust Junior here for possession at a Jonas Brothers concert or something?” Fitz asked between mouthfuls of Mexican rice. Sabrina blushed, and I gripped the edge of the table hard enough to crimp the cheap metal. I forget a lot of the time that I still look twenty-two, the age I was when I was turned. Sabrina just cracked forty, and she fought the good fight against the streaks of grey shooting through her dark hair, but no matter how many times I honestly told her I thought it was hot, she was pretty sensitive about the apparent difference in our ages. There is an actual age difference as well, but it’s only four years, and I’m the elder. I guess I’m still technically twenty-two, because that’s when I died. But I’ve been around for twice that many years. I just look like I don’t have to shave every day yet. Which I don’t, because I don’t have to shave at all. Because I’ve been dead too long. Look, vampire aging is weird, and it’s a bit of a sore spot with Sabrina.

“I just look young, Detective Fitzpatrick,” I said through gritted teeth.

“Fitz, Jimmy-boy. I told you, call me Fitz. And I know, you’re like thirty-eight, right?”

“Forty-four,” I replied. “I work out a lot, and take good care of my skin.” This was one of the first conversations I had with Fitzpatrick, several weeks ago when we met. I’d told him I was a long-distance mountain biker to explain how I kept in shape, and told him that I only ride at night because the sun is so deadly, what with skin cancer in my family and all. Well, part of that was true, anyway.

I could see another question brewing in Fitzpatrick’s eyes, but I was saved by Sabrina’s phone buzzing just as he opened his mouth. We all turned to her, then Sean’s phone rang, too, and I knew our night was over. She looked up at me, the apology in her eyes for a lot more than our ruined date night. “Sorry, Jimmy,” she said, glancing at the screen. “It’s McDaniel. I have to take this.” She stood up and stepped out of the restaurant, pressing the phone to her ear.

“I just got a text,” Fitzpatrick said with a grimace. “Lets you know who the important partner is, doesn’t it?”

I actually felt a little bad for the guy. It wasn’t his fault that Lieutenant McDaniel had his eye on Sabrina for years, ever since she started with the department. It wasn’t his fault that McDaniel and I also had a solid working relationship, thanks to me deciding not to mojo him into submission when I took over for Tiram. And it also wasn’t his fault that there were still a pile of rednecks in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department that looked on him as just another Yankee carpetbagger. So I felt a little bit bad for the guy. He really was just a cop in a new city trying to make a living.

I still wanted to strangle him most of the time, and if he ever crashed another date of mine, I was going to compel him to walk down Tryon Street at noon with his pants around his ankles singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” I feel bad for the guy, but I’m not bucking for sainthood.

Sabrina came back to the table and grabbed her jacket and purse. “Let’s go, partner. We got a body.” She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek, whispering “sorry” into my ear. “Jimmy, can you get the check?”

“No problem. Go fight crime. Catch The Joker, or Clayface, or Doc Ock, or whoever is terrorizing Metropolis this week,” I said, waving the waitress over. She looked more than a little relieved to see Sabrina and Fitzpatrick weaving through tables on the way to the door.

I gave her a little smile as I asked for the check, and pulled out my phone to text Greg that I was on the way home and that I had dibs on the big TV and Breath of the Wild. As I did, the old flip phone fell out of my pocket onto the floor with a clatter. I picked it up, frowning a little. I wonder if I have a charger for this thing at home. Be interesting to see who tried to call me this afternoon.

I WALKED IN through my front door and hung my jacket in the closet, then looked at the stairs leading down to the war room/video-game lounge where I could hear Greg shouting at some faceless opponent in Injustice 2. He was still pissed we didn’t get the ability to turn into bats when we became vampires, and the best way for him to take out those frustrations was by pretending to be a superhero in the fighter video game. I didn’t give him too much crap about it, but I did razz him about his seemingly excessive interest in playing as Supergirl. I’d seen my partner in spandex. It wasn’t pretty.

I decided to leave the TV and game system to Greg for a little while and did the moderately responsible thing and went upstairs to my room. I knelt in the floor of the closet and hauled out a couple of smoky- smelling cardboard boxes of junk left over from when we first moved in to this UNC-Charlotte frat house. Our old place had burned down, and killing the nest of vampires that used to live here left a convenient and much-needed new lair. Our old lair was pretty much toast. I didn’t have a lot from those days, but the box in front of me held a few knickknacks that mostly survived the fire. If a charger for this old flip phone existed, it would be in here.

Five minutes later, I was surrounded by action figures, classic Nintendo cartridges, a couple of charred Sandman trade paperbacks, and one slightly melted belt buckle. But no phone charger. I scowled at the useless phone in my hand and tossed all the other crap back in the box. Just as I was about to shove the whole mess back into the floor of the closet, I stopped myself. “Nope,” I said. “You do not pass the one-year test, so you are outta here.” Then I shoved the phone back in my pocket, closed the flaps on the box, and carried it down to the game room.

“What’s that?” Greg asked from the couch, pausing in his war against the heroes of the DC Universe long enough to glance over at me.

“Bunch of crap left over from the fire. I was looking for a phone charger, and figured I’d throw this stuff out. Haven’t touched this box since we moved in here; no point in keeping it any longer.”

“Oh my God, Jimmy Black makes a mature decision! Alert the media. This whole Master of the City thing must be taking a real toll on you.”

“Kiss my ass,” I grumbled, putting the box on the floor by the secret door that led into the Morlock tunnels. I pulled out the old phone and tossed it to him. “You got anything that will charge this?”

He caught the phone in midair—vampire reflexes making us both much more dexterous than we ever were in life—and raised an eyebrow at me. “Probably, but why? I mean, you still run through a lot of iPhones, but going back to a flip seems a little extreme. Or are you going street-level with your criminal enterprises now?”

“Ha ha. It rang today, and I want to know who in the hell still has that number. That’s all.”

“This thing rang? How the hell was this thing still charged?”

“I blame William,” I said. “He probably charged it for me when he transferred my crap to Tiram’s office, then we both forgot about it. It was buried in a desk drawer.”

Greg’s face took on a thoughtful expression. “Yeah, that makes sense. He is more organized than any three people I’ve ever met. Well, let’s see if I’ve got a charger in my Desk of Many Things.” He tossed the Xbox controller on the couch and walked over to his desk. He opened the bottom drawer and started rooting around in what could pass as a techno-archeological dig. I watched in silent amazement as he pulled out one of every generation of iPod, two Zune MP3 players, and some silver-and-blue thing that looked about the size of a pack of cigarettes and made a resounding thump as he set it on the desk. Wires, adaptors, and various miniature disk drives and card readers piled up around him, and I started to worry that he’d opened up a dimensional rift inside the drawer when finally he emerged from the depths with a black cord attached to a wall transformer. “Eureka! I have found it!” he shouted, just before everything on the desk shifted and the entire mountain of technical artifacts toppled over, burying my partner in the most important entertainment advances of every one of the last twenty years.