February
Lucy's Age: 19
I went back home in a daze. I was so far gone that I didn't think to look inside of the envelope until after I'd climbed the fire escape and was back inside my room. The envelope proved to be a veritable smorgasbord of financial information.
There was everything from lists of offshore, numbered accounts with distressingly large approximate balances next to them, to bus lockers and bank deposit boxes that seemed to contain everything from gold coins to guns.
The key to the whole arrangement, quite literally, was a thin key buried in with all of the paper that provided access to a storage unit that held the keys for the rest of the secure locations she'd detailed out.
The last sheet of paper had a cell phone number on it that was listed as Mrs. Agosti's. By the time I finished working my way through everything else in the envelope it was too late to call, but the next day I bounced around the house until I decided that it was late enough to call without running the risk of waking Mrs. Agosti up.
Someone picked up on the third ring, but it wasn't Mrs. Agosti who answered.
"Hello, this is Clarissa Agosti's phone."
"Um, hi, is Mrs. Agosti there?"
It was obvious from the pause in the conversation that whoever I was talking to had bad news that she didn't want to share with me.
"I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this, but my aunt Clarissa was involved in a hit-and-run accident last night. She…well, she didn't survive. The police are pursuing a few leads, but they don't seem to have much hope that they'll manage to track down her killer."
I felt like my whole world had just been upended. I'd only just found Mrs. Agosti again and now she was gone. The silence dragged out for several seconds before I was able to get control of myself enough to speak again.
"I'm sorry for your loss. Mrs. Agosti was a great woman."
I hung up the call and then collapsed onto my bed. She'd handed me her entire life savings just a short time before she'd been killed. It all seemed too bizarre to be an accident. She'd somehow known that she was going to be killed.
I wanted to leave the apartment, drive up to her town and start hunting down her killer, but I didn't know anything about her current life. I didn't know who might have motive, I didn't know anything.
It wasn't until I heard the apartment door open that I realized that I didn't necessarily need to know anything more than I already knew in order to find Mrs. Agosti's killer. I knew one person who had motive, who'd always had motive.
Geoffrey knocked on my bedroom door, but I didn't tell him to come in, instead I opened the door and looked up at him defiantly.
"You killed her. You killed Mrs. Agosti just because I visited her."
"You visited Mrs. Agosti?"
"Don't play dumb, Geoffrey. I don't know how you found out, but you found out and then you killed her."
"Just be quiet for a minute. I didn't kill her."
I opened my mouth to really let him have it, but the expression on his face told me that I'd pushed him as far as I could. With a normal person I might have kept pushing anyways, but I knew what Geoffrey was capable of.
I watched as Geoffrey walked over to Mrs. Phelps' room and knocked on her door. "Mrs. Phelps, would you be so kind as to take a trip to the store for me? I think we're running low on pasta."
Mrs. Phelps was a nasty old woman, but she wasn't stupid. She looked at Geoffrey and then she looked at me, but I waved for her to leave. Whatever benefit she thought she might gain by staying and hearing Geoffrey and I air our dirty laundry wasn't actually going to pay off for her, not given the fact that Geoffrey was more than capable of just killing her to make sure there weren't any loose ends wandering around.
The two of us stood in silence as Mrs. Phelps pulled on her coat and scarf. Once she was disappearing down the hall, Geoffrey sent the two muscle-head guards off too.
"Okay, now we're going to discuss this like two sane individuals. That means no yelling."
"Fine. I know everything, Geoffrey. Venice tracked me down months ago. She found me and almost killed me because she thought I was your human lover. Only she found out that I wasn't your lover and somehow we became friends."
Geoffrey's eyes had gotten big. In someone else it would have been an indication of mild surprise, but for him it was the equivalent of falling off of a chair. He opened his mouth to ask me a question, but I just kept right on going.
"She told me that you and Imastious can read minds and she said that you have some kind of defense mechanism that allows you to stop him from getting at the important things inside your mind, but that is why you go all cold and calculating occasionally. She wanted to get you out, wanted to convince you to run away, but she knew you'd never go for it unless we managed to get you to reconnect with us first."
"So you asking for extra training sessions, you helping with the utilities analysis, it's all been a ploy to manipulate me?"
"No, not manipulate you, to save you. It was working too. You were the most normal I'd ever seen you be up until a little while ago when you started worrying about Imastious. So Venice came up with a plan to distract Imastious only everything went sideways and she ended up bleeding to death down in the subway. So she called me for help. I grabbed the four bags of blood that you'd hidden in the freezer and went to try and help her."
Geoffrey's jaw clenched. "Only that went sideways too, didn't it? Did she attack you?"
"Yes, she tried to kill me, tried to drain me dry. I put a knife through her arm and then pinned her to the floor with a metal pipe. By the way, it was obvious at that point that she wasn't human, which means that you aren't human either, are you?"
"No, I'm not. May I ask how you're managing to be so mobile?"
"Sure. Mrs. Phelps has been stealing from you for years. I caught her at it right after she moved in and have been blackmailing her not to say anything when I go down the fire escape. Are you going to kill her now too?"
"No, I'll simply put the fear of God into her and then I'll fire her. I don't kill people as casually as you seem to think I do."
"But you do kill them, don't you. You kill for Imastious, and you kill to protect your interests, financial or otherwise, and you probably kill to feed too, don't you?"
"Yes on all counts, but I didn't kill Mrs. Agosti. In fact, I went to a rather unusual amount of trouble to avoid killing her back when she first defied me."
"I saw her journal, Geoffrey. She showed it to me yesterday when I went to her house. I know that you tortured her and then you wiped her mind. I know what you're capable of. Hell, I've known what you're capable of this entire time, but for some reason I still trusted you. I think that is the part that is the hardest for me to accept. I trusted someone who is fundamentally untrustworthy."
Geoffrey pulled his phone out of his pocket and tossed it to me. "Venice is in my contacts. Call her and ask her where I was yesterday. I'm not proud of most of what I've done in my life, but for years I've done nothing but try very hard to do right by you."
He turned around and walked out of the apartment while I was still looking down at the phone. I stared at the door he'd closed behind him for several seconds before looking up Venice's number and dialing it.
"What's up, love?"
"It's me, Venice, not Geoffrey."
"What are you doing with his phone, Lucy? Put it back before he finds out that you've swiped it!"
"He already knows. I confronted him with everything I knew. Just now, this morning. He handed me his phone and left."
"What the hell were you thinking?"
The rage in her voice was unfeigned, but I didn't care anymore. No matter how much of a monster Venice was she couldn't hurt me because she didn't know where I was. Geoffrey had left assuming that I wouldn't be able to get very far before he came back to carry out whatever plan was hatching in the back of his mind. He didn't know about the money that Mrs. Agosti had left me. I would be gone by the time he returned to the apartment, and I would never even look back.
"I wasn't thinking, Venice. I was reacting. I was reacting to the fact that you're some kind of monster and that last night Geoffrey ran down one of the only two people who've ever really loved me."
Venice took a deep breath. Even over the phone I could tell that she was doing her absolute best to master her rage.
"I don't know what you think happened, but Geoffrey was with me from yesterday morning until a couple of hours ago. My plan to rattle Imastious' cage worked and he's had us running hits on rival assets almost non-stop for days now. There's no way that Geoffrey has had the time and energy to plan anything untoward over the last few days."
My head was whirling. Despite everything else that had happened, when Venice had said that they'd spent the night together, I'd felt my heart constrict almost to the point of breaking. Apparently I was still more conflicted where Geoffrey was concerned than I'd realized. Even knowing that he was a monster, even mostly believing that he'd killed Mrs. Agosti, still hadn't cured me of my desire for him.
I tore my thoughts away from Geoffrey and focused back on the call. The silence stretched out for nearly half a minute as the two of us played a kind of conversational chicken. I was the first to break.
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"That I'm a vampire?"
"Yeah, that would have been a good starting place."
Venice's sigh tugged at my chest. "I made sure that you knew I was a monster in other ways, maybe I thought that would be enough of a heads up for you."
"Maybe, or maybe you were worried that if I knew the truth then you wouldn't be able to convince me to help you try and redeem Geoffrey."
"Yeah, there was probably part of that in the mix too. Don't get too high and mighty though. You left me for dead in that rat-infested hole in the ground."
"After you tried to kill me!"
"I told you to get the blood bags, but you refused to listen."
I wanted to hit something, but I wasn't immature enough to go around destroying the apartment just because I was pissed.
"That whole situation went wrong because you refused to tell me the truth. If you'd told me you were a vampire I would have grabbed the blood right away because I would have known that you wouldn't bleed out like a human."
"Yeah, but if I'd done that would you have even been there to save me in the first place? I'm a vampire, but that doesn't make me that different from you, Lucy. I'm scared of dying as much as anyone else. More maybe because I know just how long I could live if I manage to make sure that nobody sticks three feet of steel through my chest. Would you have really acted any differently if you'd been the one in my place?"
She was right, that was the real question. If I'd known what I was getting into back when she'd first approached me about trying to redeem Geoffrey I probably wouldn't have helped. The thought of saving someone who killed people for nourishment went against everything I believed in, but now that I was this involved I was having a hard time not coming up with justifications for everything we'd done so far.
"I honestly don't know. I'd like to say that I would have, that if I'd been the vampire I would have told you and let you make your own decision, but who knows what I would have really done."
"Sucks to deal in grays instead of black and whites, huh?"
"Yeah, I guess it does at that. This doesn't mean that I've forgiven you."
There was a trace of the normal Venice back in her response. "That's okay, you've taken away the only thing that I care about, and you're not even really sure that you want him. You may have just ruined everything we've been working for these last few months and it was all because you were too much of a child to deal with the world as it actually was. In case you didn't get the gist of all of that, I'm not sure that I've forgiven you yet either."
The sheer venom in her voice by the end of her response practically knocked me back on my heels. She'd always acted so calm about our situation that I'd forgotten sometimes just how much she had invested in Geoffrey.
The silence grew again, but this time it was Venice that blinked first. "I didn't sleep with him last night. I'm still painfully celibate, have been since before I met you."
"Thank you. For telling me, and for not capitalizing on any opportunity that might have been there."
"Yeah, whatever. Look, I need to go see if I can track down Geoffrey and undo whatever damage you've just done. Assuming that I survive the experience, you need to spend some time deciding whether you're still interested in him. The important stuff hasn't changed yet. I still want him out from under Imastious' thumb, so if you're the best chance of making that happen, then I'll stay out of the middle of things."