Vishous left the Brotherhood mansion alone and told nobody where he was going. It wasn’t that he was hiding anything, it was just that Butch was out in the field with Rhage, John Matthew and Tohr, Wrath was at the Audience House with Phury and Z, and yada, yada, yada.
Oh, and Jane was down in the clinic.
Which was fine.
So yeah, he had no one to tell and nobody whose radar was trained on his whereabouts. S’all good.
The snowstorm of the night before had left a cleanup problem in its wake, and as V dematerialized to the outer rim of Caldwell’s urban downtown, he saw all kinds of what he expected: some removal progress, but really, still a shitload of white stuff covering all manner of parked cars and apartment buildings, the main roads down to two lanes, the alleyways impassible, the sidewalks uncleared.
The address he re-formed in front of was a three-story Victorian that had been cut up into a trio of flats. Lights were on in each of the levels, and the humans inside were chilling, winding down from work.
Or … in the case of the apartment he was interested in, getting stoned.
Shifting his position up to the roof of the building across the street, he lit a hand-rolled and watched. And waited. The particular human he was waiting for was not yet home, and he knew this because he’d done some research on good ol’ Damn Stoker.
Turned out “he” was a woman. A Ms. Jo Early, who happened to work at the Caldwell Courier Journal.
The fact that she was female had kind of impressed him, actually. He’d assumed the clarity of voice and non-emotional presentation of facts in that blog meant a male set of fingers were doing the walking, but come on. As if his shellan wasn’t the same?
Jane was as tough as they came, and more clear thinking than he was.
Like, for example, he was quite sure Jane wasn’t in a funk over the status of their mating. No, she was working at her job saving lives. He was the one doing the Dr. Phil bullshit—
Okaaaaaaaaaay, let’s try and not make everything about ourselves, shall we, he thought.
As he smoked and tried to get his brain off his relationship, his gray matter did indeed take him in another direction. Too bad it wasn’t much of an improvement. Assuming he wanted a little peace.
As he had been sitting at his desk during the day and checking YouTube videos and Facebook pages and Insta accounts for vampire sightings by humans, he had been tempted by an old email addy of his, one that he’d abandoned as soon as Doc Jane had come into his life.
Well, actually, he’d stopped using it pretty much after he’d met Butch.
The handle, which was a pseudonym, and its associated Gmail account, was one he had registered on websites where subs went begging for Doms, both inside the species and out.
There had always been volunteers for him, back in the day. Females and males, men and women, all of whom were looking for a certain kind of experience—and V had had a routine that he followed with them. First, he’d meet them out at clubs or through references and screen them, picking and choosing the most attractive ones—or the ones who he thought would put on a good show. Then he’d take them to his pent-house at the top of the Commodore and play around with them until he got bored. Whenever he was done, he’d kick them out.
A few he saw more than once. The vast majority had been one and dones.
There had been only three regulars.
Back then, it had been all about burning off his edge, tempering his dark side, turning the dimmer switch down on his drives.
He signed into the account today.
Around noon.
Right after he’d gotten a text from Jane telling him that Blay’s mom had come through the operation just fine, but wanted to go home—so Jane had to stay at the clinic and try to talk the female out of leaving. The quick missive had come through about two hours after she’d told him she was done in the OR and on her way to the Pit—all she had to do was make sure the older Lyric came out of anesthesia. Which had been preceded two hours prior to that with a text talking about Assail.
There had been almost two hundred emails in the account.
And he had read through every single one of them. Some were short, nothing but vital stats with maybe a picture as an attachment. Others were long and rambling, streams of consciousness about what they wanted to have done to them. There were also two-paragraphers that begged for him to reconsider, reconnect, resume. And introductory sentences with phone numbers. And angry tirades that he couldn’t just forget them, no, no he could not, they weren’t going to have it, they were going to find him and make him realize how they were the right one for him …
It was like an archaeological dig in the relics of a city he had once constructed, assumed residence in, and lorded over.
Down below, on the cramped, snow-choked street, a Honda pulled up to the apartment building. Whoever was in it talked for a minute, and then the passenger-side door opened and a slender, red-haired human female got out.
“We’ll talk tomorrow, then?” she said into the car. “Okay. Yup, I’m on it—yeah, I’ll get it posted on the CCJ website tomorrow first thing. Dick can go pound sand.”
With a final wave, she shut the door and scooted around the blunt hood of the car. Putting her arms out to balance, she stepped through a snowbank in the predetermined footprints many people had used, then she skated up the walkway and checked the mailbox beside the right of the two doors.
A few moments later, he saw her walk through the second story’s front room and talk to the guys who were passing a bong back and forth as they sat on the sofa in front of the TV.
She looked pissed, V thought, as she put one hand on her hip and shook a stack of what looked like bills in their direction.
Then she marched off into the front bedroom and closed the door.
He looked away when she started to undress, but he didn’t need to bother. As it turned out, she just took off her outer coat and finished the rest in a bathroom that had a frosted window.
She ended up at her desk, in front of her POS Apple product, hitting the Internet.
As V lit another hand-rolled, he debated just putting a bullet in her head, but then decided he was only being cranky. Apart from the videos and shit that she posted, a cursory check of her background hadn’t yielded any red flags. She was the adopted kid of some rich folks. Meh job working at the CCJ on Internet content. Previously had been a receptionist at a real estate company. Pretty fancy school résumé, but like a lot of young kids, hadn’t done shit with that.
Unless you counted using proper grammar while talking about vampires.
So yeah, all he needed to do was erase her and he could go back to the Pit.
Taking a drag, he released the smoke and watched it float away on the mostly still air.
Off in the distance, he heard a siren.
Ambulance, he thought. That was an ambulance.
Overhead, in the crystal clear, velvet blue sky, only the brightest stars twinkled because of downtown’s sweating of illumination, but the planes showed up well enough, their flight patterns around the Caldwell International Airport concentric, invisible rings.
Like maybe God was using a highlighter to circle the city for some kind of follow-up.
After a while of staring at the human female, he wondered again why he wasn’t getting on with what he’d come out here to do. Hacking into her site and taking control of it, and then erasing content off YouTube, he could do back home.
Had to do, that was.
The Internet, after all, was kind of like a petri dish in a lab. If you wanted to a grow a certain culture, you just created the right conditions and let time do its thing: Enough chatter and talk about vampires, backed up by enough footage, and sooner or later it was going to catch on, because humans loved spooky shit, particularly if they thought it was sexy.
Yawn.
Conversely, if you had to kill an idea? You just made it disappear, and soon enough, the white noise of human drama replaced it with something else.
Humans’ ability to be distracted was, aside from their relatively easily extinguished mortality, their best feature.
’Cuz, really, when it came to vampires, who the fuck needed Ellen interviewing the Omega about his favorite holiday traditions or a posthumous book on Lash hitting the New York Times bestseller list, true?
Or worse, and all jests aside, the motherfuckers going on a hunt for the race.
Those rats without tails couldn’t get along with each other. They suddenly find themselves coexisting with another species on the level that vampires were shoulder-to-shoulder’ing them?
You could wipe the co- and -exist thing right outta your vocab.
So yeah, he was going to have to tidy up this little mess out on the Net, as well as have a “talk” with Ms. Jo Early, too: Assuming she’d been a vampire lover all her life, that kind of cognition was not going to be reversible, but he could certainly tinker around in her gray matter and redirect her from her blog.
Yup, he thought. It was time to ghost into her bedroom, find out what was doing in that skull of hers, and then head back to get his virtual Swiffer rocking on the Internet.
Uh-huh.
Yeaaaaah.
And yet V stayed where he was, ashing on the snow-covered roof, shifting his weight back and forth whenever his legs got tired, stretching his back from time to time.
The reason he didn’t leave had nothing to do with that woman.
No, he stayed for the same reason he had gone out.
When you were contemplating cheating on your mate, it was not easy on the conscience. And not something you wanted to do in the home you shared with her.