Greywalker

Chapter 20

"Improvise." Her eyes were chasms of confusion. She started shaking her head. "No, no. I don't 'improvise. I plan things, I prepare for contingencies. This is—this is not something I have any plan for."

I started thinking out loud. "I suppose you could think of it as it Cameron had an exotic medical condition that requires a change of lifestyle. He's still your son. He's still a decent, intelligent young man. He's just… different."

Her mouth turned down in distaste. "You sound like a counselor." Cameron came back with the cognac bottle and some glasses. He poured generous measures for all of us. I gave him a sharp look.

He returned a "what?" look and a shrug. "It's alcohol, I can practically absorb it through my skin. It's not going to hurt me." He sat down next to his mother.

We sipped. Colleen Shadley gulped. She shuddered and finished off her drink.

"All right, Cam," she gasped, setting the glass down, "tell me how this happened. Help me understand it."

He refilled her glass, avoiding meeting her eyes. "Well, Mom, the details are kind of unpleasant. I did something I felt was necessary, but I did it badly. Can't we just say that it happened because I thought I knew more than I did?"

"All right. Someday I expect to get the whole story out of you, but I can let that go for now. Go on with the rest."

"I met someone who wasn't very pleasant and he took advantage of me, because I wasn't as clever as I thought."

Colleen stiffened and began to cough on alcohol fumes. She waved Cameron away as he tried to help and caught her breath on her own. "Go on," she repeated. Her eyes watered. She dabbed at them as her son talked. "I got sick."

"I remember you were ill for a while after Christmas." "More like February, Mom, but it doesn't matter. Anyhow, I was mega-sick and I didn't know why. And when I found out, I didn't know what to do. So I tried to get some help, but things haven't worked out so well. I've got a few problems to settle before everything will be… acceptable. But the plain fact is I'm a vampire, and that's not going to change. It can't be undone. I just have to live with it—or unlive with it," he added and laughed. His mother made a face. "Oh, come on, Mom. It's a joke." She mumbled her discomfort. "Mom, can you live with it?"

This time, Colleen played with her glass. "I suppose I don't have a choice. You're my son. I can't just pretend you've ceased to exist. I can't—I couldn't bring myself to… do anything to you. Are—are you really all right?"

"As all right as this gets. Better, now that you know. Harper and I are working on the rest. See, I have a plan now, like you always tell me. So it's going to be OK. But I could use some of your help, too, Mom."

"My help? What can I do?" She sounded younger than her son. "We'll have to work out some new arrangements with the trust—I can't go to classes in the daytime. And I need to make some new living arrangements, too. My car's nice, but the trunk is kind of cramped."

Her smile wobbled. "I'm sure we can think of something. Oh, Cameron, why couldn't you have gotten into some normal kind of trouble?"

"Just precocious, I guess."

We sat around the white room for another hour, working out details—including my billing. By the time I left I was envying Cam his cozy bed in the trunk of the Camaro. I dragged myself home to my own, head bobbing like a somnolent drinky-bird's all the way.

When I got out of bed, noon was cracking overhead with the bing-bang-bong of the Catholic clock. I rushed for my office.

My first job was contacting Lenore Fabrette to say I could pay for the information. She replied that she'd gotten it and would bring it on Thursday, as planned.

I tried to make a little more sense out of the TPM papers I already had and the new ones that came in over the fax, but most of it was too dense with corporate legalese to plow through with speed. I set the pile aside and made more phone calls, phone calls, phone calls. I had a date for dinner with a friend and I didn't want to miss a moment of normalcy before diving into an evening of interviewing vampires.

Even at a quarter to eleven, it seemed that the vampire community was still just waking up. It was nearly midnight before I found Alice in the top-floor lounge of a downtown hotel.

The host at the door pointed her out to me: a petite woman with deep red hair and the same shadowy, filmy-gleaming eyes that Cameron exhibited. She lurked at a corner table, watching. I skirted around the dance floor and approached.

"Hi," I started. "Are you Alice Liddell?"

She looked up from under arched brows. "At the moment." She stretched one corner of her broad mouth into a smile and floated a hand at my side of the table. Alternating waves of heat and cold flushed over me. "Why don't you sit down?" she offered. My knees resisted a bit as I sat across from her, frowning as I wrestled with my sense of familiarity.

Her amused, silent evaluation hammered my spine with spikes of frozen fire. I didn't have to look sideways to see that all light around her seemed to have been sucked away, leaving a pulsing corona of dark red around her pale face. I checked my shudder and stared back at her. My stomach did a slow roll. Apparently, vampires brought their Grey effects with them, whether I liked it or not.

Her voice was chill velvet, stroking over my skin. "How do you happen to come looking for me?"

I had to swallow before I could talk. "Cameron Shadley sent me. My name is Harper Blaine—"

She seemed to be on the verge of laughing—a sound I did not want to hear. "Yes, I know. Do you smoke?" she purred, picking up an old-fashioned cigarette case from the table. "Oh, no. Of course you don't. You're one of those delicious, healthy people." She extracted a pale cigarette from the case with the tips of her long, manicured nails and placed it between her lips with all the slow tease of a golden-age movie siren. She could have ignited it with her own heat. Instead, she used a slim gold lighter and let her first drag ooze out of her mouth. It made a rising blue veil between us. "What does Cameron think I can do for you?"

"You know about his problems with Edward?"

"Of course."

"I think he was hoping you could offer some kind of entree."

She chuckled and I felt a pain in my stomach. "How delicious," she said, twisting my meaning. Her teeth showed a little. They seemed very wet and very sharp. "Just how well do you know Cameron?"

"Why? Are you not in the habit of dining on the friends of friends?" I shot back. "Cameron is my client and I know a vampire when I see one." I glared at her and refused to drop my eyes, even though her gaze razored my spine. I wanted to throw up, or scream, or anything that would make her stop looking at me, but I clenched my teeth and sat still.

She played with her cigarette. "What an interesting proposition you are, Ms. Blaine. I wonder if you appreciate it."

"Probably, considering I believe you could snap my spine before I could see you move," I replied. "But Cameron knows where I am and how to find me just as well as you do. So, do you want to break my neck or do you want to help us?"

She hummed a cloud of smoke at me and propped her pointed chin in her hand. "Oh, I want to help, believe me. Cameron's a… sweet boy." She smirked and sat back in her chair, sipping at her glass of… something. "What does he think I can do for you?"

"Cameron has been having problems… adjusting. He's hired me to help make some kind of reconciliation with Edward and work out a way to receive the mentoring he didn't get. He suggested that you might be sympathetic to his position."

"Sympathy is expensive. What are you offering in exchange for my help?"

"That depends on what you bring to the table. If you can give information or make a suggestion that helps me out, I may be able to help you. So…?"

"Kill him."

"Edward?"

"Of course."

"Is that your suggestion or just what you want?"

"Both." She leaned forward, trying to snare me with her stare. "Edward's been in charge long enough, and he's getting long in the tooth, making mistakes. Just look at Cameron. And he doesn't even know about you. And what kind of leader is that, who can't even protect us from one little boy and his" — she looked me over again, licking smoke from her lips—"very interesting friend."

I felt like something nasty was sliding over me as I looked back into her eyes.

She continued, grinning very slightly. "I think it's time we had someone a little younger in charge. Someone more capable of sympathizing with a young man in a hard spot. Someone with sharper teeth. Her lips closed slowly over the knife-edge gleam of her canines.

I felt myself leaning forward, breathing shallow, numb breaths. "You hate him."

She raised her eyebrows. "Hate? Oh, yes." She hissed voluptuous delight. "With every drop of borrowed blood. It would be so easy for you to attack in daylight when he's weakest. You don't even have to kill him, just show his weakness."

"I'm not getting it."

"Let me tell you the way it is with us. We're like wolves, and the toughest wolf gets to lead the pack. But if he shows weakness, instability, insanity, the pack will shred him. He must be strong and his actions must be in our best interest. Attack him, show his weakness, and they will kill him for you." "I see."

"Yes," she hissed. "You do. Once Edward is truly dead and I am in charge, I will, of course, be very, very grateful."

Something crawled over my skin. Twitching my gaze aside, I caught a red thread of movement in the Grey and pulled back from it, taking a deep breath and shaking my head. The red thing slid away, dissolving onto the air. I blinked rapidly, shedding a sudden sleepiness, but unable to get the ringing of Alice's voice entirely out of my head.

"What's to stop him from killing me first?"

She laughed, and I tried not to cringe. "You don't look like a threat. Who regards the twitching of insects? Once the mud is stirred up, it'll be too late and killing you off won't clear his waters. Quite the opposite. He'll be far too busy to squash you. When the pack turns on him, they will rend him limb from limb." She paused and licked her lips before taking another sip of her drink. She shivered and smiled horrors at me. I swallowed bile.

"I don't see how Cameron benefits from Edward's demise."

"By my gratitude," she growled.

I shook my head. "No. I don't think so. Not inclined to rely on the generosity of vampires, considering Edward's example. Who protects me from you?"

She ground her teeth. "I assure you you'll come to no harm if you do what I say."

I managed to shake my head. "I won't kill anyone. I'm not a hired gun and I'm not interested in playing in your political pool."

Alice leaned forward and her eyes blazed. "Then what good are you to me?"

"I'm not here to help you. I'm here to help my client. I'll find Edward's weaknesses, his mistakes, rake up the muck, but the rest is up to you. And you'll owe me."

She laughed and stabbed out her cigarette with a hard jab in the ashtray. She sipped her drink and watched me over the rim, smiling razor slashes. "All right, we'll do it your way, for now. But I will still be watching you." Then she sat forward and put out her hand, palm up. "Let me see your list."

"What list?"

"The list of names. Cameron must have given you one, else how would you have found me? Hand it over," she demanded, beckoning her crimson-clawed fingers at me.

I dragged out the list. Alice snatched it and read it. A new gleam entered her eyes. "Oh, very interesting…" She pulled a fountain pen from her tiny purse and wrote a new name at the bottom: Wygan.

"There," she said, flinging the page back to me as dismissal. "Start with Carlos. That should loosen up the dirt under Edward's feet. And don't worry—I'll keep Edward's attention off of you. I did promise. By the time you've finished with that lot, his problems will have just started."

I got up from the table and walked out. I could feel her gaze on me all the way to the elevator, like freezing water rolling down my back.

I did not want to follow Alice's orders, though I felt a mental nudging to do so. I stared at the list as the elevator descended. Unfortunately, the closest vampire was Carlos. If I was going to talk to anyone else tonight, it would have to be him.

I was crossing the lobby when my pager went off. I used a desk phone to call the number. Cameron answered at the other end.

"Where are you?" I asked. My head throbbed and a matching ache had grown in my innards.

"I'm at Sarah's place. Uh, she says to say hi and she got two ferrets instead of one."

"I'm happy for her. I just finished talking to Alice and things are… well, they're trickier than I thought. Could you meet me tonight?"

"Not tonight. Tomorrow. Call it an hour after sundown, which is… eight twenty-seven, so, nine thirty?"

"All right. I'll see you then. For now, I'm going to see Carlos."

"Oh, man… be careful, Harper. If I don't see you tomorrow, I'll know who to ask, at least."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence, Cameron."

I checked my watch as I left the lobby; it was twelve thirty-nine and dread was twisting in my stomach. I did not want to precipitate a palace coup, but Alice's point about the protective behavior of vampires was giving me an idea. I didn't know if I could manage it, but my other options seemed feeble. I had to trust Alice to cover my tracks as she'd said. If she hated Edward enough, she would. I was banking on hate.

The list said I could find Carlos at Adult Fantasies, a sex shop just behind a strip of businessmen's motels from which they probably culled most of their clientele.

Less than ten minutes' walk from the swanky shops and condos of downtown, the tangled area of odd-shaped blocks housed a strip joint, two all-night bar-and-grills, and Adult Fantasies in their own little commerce park of public embarrassment and private greed. Efforts to move them off or shut them down were never completely successful. Even a plan to make the area into a park had come to naught; eighty years of industrial dumping had made the ground too toxic. So the nighthawks' wasteland remained and Seattle's history of making money off sin continued in all its tawdry glory.

The Adult Fantasies building was a sharply pointed triangle. Full-height windows at the point opened up a view right through the fetish wear and lingerie. I pulled open the plate glass door, went past the stairs that led to the video parlor and "home of live girls," and into the store proper. To my left was the clothing: on my right, the stuff even a sex shop doesn't put in the window. Ahead was a glass counter of X-rated impulse items, guarded by a cash register and a Goth girl.

Her hair was deep, oily purple, her face rice-powder white around black lips and battered-raccoon eyes. Two small, black niobium rings pierced her right eyebrow and a fine silver chain connected the ring in her left nostril to one in her left ear. For balance, the earring on the right was a heavy black spider web with its ruby resident dangling within. A studded leather collar with swags of chain imprisoned her neck. She glanced at me over a notebook she had spread on the countertop. Realizing I was coming straight to her, she closed the book and put her pen down on top of it.

She looked midtwenties, though she sounded like a teenager. "Hi, did you have a question?"

"Is Carlos in?"

"Oh, he's around. Probably upstairs. Just a second." She looked around the store and spotted a young man over in the only dark corner the store had, crowded between vibrating plastic penises and the green-painted dressing-room doors.

She called to him. "Jason, is Carlos upstairs?"

Jason raised his head out of a cardboard shipping container filled with videotapes and looked in our direction. "I… um, yeah, I guess I saw him go up there about half an hour ago. One of the girls came downstairs to get him."

"Would you go up there and tell him someone down here wants to talk to him?" she asked, displaying the kind of patience mothers have for backward children.

"What about my box?"

"I'll keep an eye on it," she assured him. "OK?"

"Sure. OK. I'll go get him." Jason slumped off toward the door.

We stood there in the vague thump of music from the rooms upstairs. Her gaze kept flickering down to her notebook. "You can look around, if you want. Sometimes it takes a while for the guys to get back downstairs. I don't know why. I mean, they've seen tits before."

I nodded. "What are you studying?"

"I'm writing an article for The Stranger, about safe sex."

"That should be a winner." I wondered what qualified as safe from the point of view of someone who felt the need to chain her nose on. Not wanting to cramp her writing style, I wandered around.

I was examining a black and purple leather bustier with marabou feathers around the top when I felt my stomach fall toward the floor. I turned my head. A slab-bodied, bearded man strode toward me. He wore a clot of darkness like a cape, riding on the broad shoulders of his black leather jacket. His eyes were a couple of pits under lowering, cliff like brows. He stopped a scant two feet from me and looked me over. The desire to run far and fast, shrieking, electrified my legs and caught at my throat. I quashed the urge and pivoted to face him.

He clasped his hands in front of himself. "You wanted to see me?" he rumbled.

The breath. I tried not to flinch. "Alice sent me," I stated.

"Alice." Glaciers react more.

"Liddell." I stared right back at him, even though it racked me. A tremor of fright moved under my skin.

He grunted. "Let's go to the office." He turned, assuming I would follow him. As we passed the counter, he glanced at the Goth girl.

"Keep Jason out."

"OK," she agreed, barely raising her head from her page.

A door next to the dressing rooms led to a small storage room with a desk and a couple of chairs shoved in among the boxes and files. Carlos went behind the desk and pointed at the chair on my side.

"Sit down."

I did.

He folded his arms on the desktop, cupping his left elbow with his right hand. His fist was as big as a billboard against the black leather sleeve. "Now. What do want with me, ghost girl?"

I bridled. "Excuse me?"

"You got 'em hangin all over you," he growled, reaching toward me. I shied, but he hooked something out of my hair and pulled it back to the desktop. A wisp of Grey, like a steam-spun cobweb, wafted from his fingertips. He wadded it up and shoved it into his inside breast pocket. "Now, what do you want?"

"I–I'm a private investigator and I'm working for Cameron Shadley."

"Edward's little blond toy? That Cameron?"

"Yes, that Cameron." I gave a sharp, annoyed nod. "But he's not Edward's 'toy, as you put it, anymore."

He sketched a shrug.

"I need to know more about Edward before I attempt to meet with him about Cameron," I continued. "Alice suggested you might have something to say that I could use."

Carlos raised an eyebrow and started laughing, bellowing shocks like a gale against a plate glass window.

"You have an ax to grind?" I prompted. I was quaking inside.

He lowered his laughter to a seismic chuckle. "You bet I've got an ax to grind, and when it's good and sharp, I'd like to bury it in that bastard's skull."

"Why?" My voice did not shake, though by rights it should have.

"You wouldn't like the story very much. Or understand it. And if I take you into my confidence, daylighter, I cross a line most of my kind would find unforgivable."

"I can't ask you to jeopardize yourself for my client's sake." I started to get up, relieved to have an excuse to leave.

"What do you plan to do with this information you're seeking?"

"Raise trouble."

Carlos frowned in thought. I shuddered at the rolling weight of his mental processes grinding over me. The Grey had been an encroaching sea near Alice. It was an inescapable drowning pool in his presence.

"You will tell no one what you learn from me."

I fought the compulsion to agree. "I will tell my client, if he needs to know, and I will use whatever I have to to get to Edward."

His stare ripped into me. "The details shall not go farther than this room until you face Edward."

I swallowed dust and shuddered. "Yes. All right." I sat back down, my knees shaking and my heart thumping weird syncopations.