Written in Red

CHAPTER 19

“Hello?”

“Did you get my present? The items were selected just for you.”

“A special messenger delivered it, even though I never gave you my address.”

“Information can be acquired if one knows who to ask.”

“Well, I love my present. I can use a number of these items on my date tomorrow evening.”

“Would you like some company? That special messenger has a variety of skills. In fact, two dozen messengers from that company are now in the city. They’re trained to handle delicate or volatile packages.”

A light laugh. “No, thanks. I’ll do just fine on my own. And I expect to find a little bit of something to send back as a thank-you.”

“In that case, I’ll look forward to our next conversation.”

Asia hung up the phone and put on the thin gloves used in a hospital’s contagious ward. As she examined each vial in the carefully packed box sent by Meg Corbyn’s owner, she silently thanked Bigwig for all the information she’d been given about various drugs and the penalties for possessing them. At the time, she’d thought of it as useful information for her TV role. Now it was vital information for real life.

Some of the items in the box were easy enough to come by, because there were few, if any, aftereffects on the person who was dosed. Some were worth several years in one of the rough prisons just for possessing the stuff, and a life sentence if you were caught using it. One item was something she’d never heard of, something called gone over wolf. Until she found out what it did, she wouldn’t ignore the warning to use it sparingly.

Asia lifted the last vial, read the label, and put it back very carefully.

And some items would earn a person a one-way trip into the wild country. No prison. Nothing so kind. Just a long ride into the Others’ territory, and then you were set loose with no food, no water, no shoes.

There was no record of anyone surviving that particular punishment.

Her new benefactor, as she’d begun to think of Meg’s owner, might be able to pull enough strings to keep himself safe from the penalties for having any of these items, but she was under no illusion that he would be that protective of her. And she had no doubt Bigwig and his group of backers would distance themselves from her if she was caught with any of the prison-worthy drugs, let alone the one that carried an automatic death penalty. So it was in her own best interest to use that last vial as soon as possible.

And she knew just how it would do her the most good.

“You know what I would really like to do?” Asia said to Darrell as she drove down the access way and parked her car behind the Liaison’s Office. There it was protected from potential thieves and out of sight of patrol cars who might take too much notice of a car left in the Courtyard parking lot overnight. On Sunsday, the car being in the lot had been her excuse to leave. Tonight, having it tucked away meant Darrell was the only one who knew for sure she had come back to the Courtyard with him.

“I’ve got a pretty good idea,” Darrell replied with a grin that looked a tiny bit off, just a little mean.

“Before that.” She turned off the car’s headlights and could barely make out the shape of the man in the other seat.

If any of the Courtyard businesses had outdoor lights by their back doors, no one had remembered to turn them on—not even the one she knew was at the top of the stairs she would be climbing shortly. Was a light too much courtesy to show a human, or had the Others assumed Darrell would take care of it?

That thought made her wonder if there would be clean sheets on the bed, and if anyone else had used the room yesterday.

“What do you want to do?” Darrell asked, that hint of mean gone as if it had never been there.

She leaned toward him, found the zipper on his trousers, and tugged it down an inch. “Take a little drive.”

“A drive?” His voice rose, almost cracking as she pulled the zipper down another inch. “Where?”

“To the Green Complex and back.”

His hand clamped over hers. She didn’t think his panting was solely due to lust.

“Asia, are you crazy?”

“Humans are allowed in the Green area.”

“Only if they have a pass! And even then it’s risky once you’re away from the Market Square.”

“But you do have a pass,” she said, putting a heavy dose of honey in the words while her fingers worked his zipper down another inch. She had slipped a few flakes of gone over wolf into his last drink at the Saucy Plate, just to see what would happen. And so far, the answer was nothing at all. Maybe she had used it a little too sparingly. “And I want to be the kind of woman who is brave enough to do something a little risky. Like spend the whole night with a man,” she finished as she tried to move her hand away from his zipper.

His hand tightened on hers almost painfully before he let her go. Withdrawing her hand, she sat primly, her eyes looking straight ahead.

“I just thought we could have a little adventure before . . .” She moved her body to convey embarrassment. “I wanted to do something special for you tonight. Something like that girl was doing in the movie we watched the last time. That you wanted me to do but I couldn’t. I even bought a book. You know. One of those manuals. Went to a bookstore clear across the city to buy it. But I guess you don’t want . . .”

He gulped air, and she knew she had him.

“We aren’t getting out of the car,” he said, a tremor in his voice.

“Oh, no,” she agreed. “That would be too risky.”

“We can’t take your car,” he said after a moment. “They don’t use cars like this inside the Courtyard. We’d be spotted a minute after we got past the Market Square. But anyone could be driving a BOW up to the Green Complex for a visit.”

Good to know, Asia thought. “Then what should we do?”

“Wait here. I need to get a key from the consulate.”

After Darrell left the car, she counted to twenty before she opened her door and got out. She unbuttoned her coat and reached for the camera she had hidden in an interior pocket. Then she looked around. No point trying to get photos of this area. Even the camera’s flash wouldn’t give her anything useful.

Darrell returned, puffing as if he’d run a marathon. Or had been running from a pack of Wolves.

“I’m not sure which BOW might be available, but the key fits any of them,” he said.

Also good to know, Asia thought as she watched him open and close the door of an empty garage slot.

“Here’s one.” He waved at her to join him.

She took her keys and locked her car. Her overnight case—and the special accessories—were in the trunk. She wasn’t planning to wear any of the clothes, so it didn’t matter if they were stiff from cold. And the powders in the vials wouldn’t freeze.

Hurrying across the snowy pavement, she slipped into the BOW’s passenger’s seat. She wondered whether the thing had a motor and hoped it had a heater.

It had both, more or less.

She clenched her teeth while Darrell backed out of the garage, then spent time closing the garage door.

“If an Owl spots the open door, it will sound the alarm,” Darrell said as he drove out of the Courtyard’s business district.

“Oh. I’m glad you thought of that.” They were still in sight of the business district when she spotted a yellow tube of light next to the road. “What’s that?”

“Solar light,” Darrell replied. “The Others put them at forks in the roads. The Green Complex is on the outer ring.”

“Where does the left-hand fork lead?”

“The interior of the Courtyard. Or maybe it goes to the Corvine gate. I don’t know.”

He sounded too nervous, so she stopped asking questions.

There were no streetlights, so there was damn little to see and no landmarks she could describe to someone else. As far as she could tell, there was a whole lot of nothing in the Courtyard until they reached the Green Complex, where Simon Wolfgard lived. When Darrell backed into one of the visitor’s parking spaces across the road from the complex, Asia swallowed her disappointment. It was just a U-shaped apartment building that didn’t even have symmetry to give it a finished look. This is where the members of the Business Association, the movers and shakers among the terra indigene, lived?

Plenty of lights here. Plenty of Others at home?

“Humans are so much better at this stuff,” Asia said.

“What stuff?”

“Buildings and cars and everything.”

Nodding, Darrell made a disparaging sound. “They think they’re living fancy because they have running water and central heating and don’t have to take a shit in the woods if they don’t want to.”

Such language from Darrell? Asia studied him with more interest. Where had that spark of anger come from? “I thought you liked working at the consulate.”

“Working for a consulate looks good on a résumé,” he replied. “And with the credit at the Market Square that employees get on top of the wages, I’m paid almost twice as much by working for the consulate as I would receive from an equivalent position in human government. But this is just a stepping-stone, a way to something better.”

Which was the real Darrell Adams: the sexually inept milquetoast she had slept with the other night, or this angry man who probably spent his evenings fantasizing about putting a bullet through Elliot Wolfgard’s brain?

“You hate them, don’t you?” she asked.

Just as Darrell was about to reply, Vladimir Sanguinati stepped out of one of the apartments. The vampire glanced their way and paused, then seemed to focus on them too much for her liking.

“Have you seen enough?” Darrell asked, his bravado deflating as the vampire walked toward them. He put the BOW in gear and drove away, spinning the tires in his effort to put some distance between them and the Green Complex before Vlad got close enough to identify them.

She hadn’t seen enough. She still didn’t know which apartment belonged to Meg Corbyn and which belonged to Simon Wolfgard. But at least she had some of the information the special messenger would need.

And she needed to think about how a substance called gone over wolf had changed milquetoast to angry man, even if the change had lasted only a minute or two. A lot of things could be achieved in a minute or two if they were the right minutes. It might be worth another experiment, depending on whether she had to accept another date.

For now, she needed to finish this evening’s plans. So when they got back to the room, she was going to give Darrell the kind of sex he didn’t have balls enough to even dream about.

Asia watched Darrell for another minute before she slipped out of bed. There had been just enough gone over wolf left in his system to make him interesting once he got aroused, but twice was more than enough. The knockout drops would keep him under for at least an hour, and that was plenty of time.

She put on Darrell’s trousers, cinching them with a belt she had bought yesterday so that the scents of all the other people who had touched it in the store would still be fairly fresh. She put on his shirt, even his socks. She put on his winter coat. Pulling the wool cap out of one pocket, she tucked her hair under it. She transferred her camera and a small flashlight from her coat to his, then put on her own boots, because she didn’t want to risk a fall.

Her hand hovered above her overnight case. There were all kinds of ways this could go wrong. But when she succeeded, the payoff was going to be sweet enough to make her the hottest star in Sparkletown.

She selected a vial and slipped it into the coat pocket. Taking the keys off the bedside table, she let herself out of the room and made her way to the back door of the Liaison’s Office.

Three keys on the ring. One was for the room they were using. One was for the other abovestairs room. And the third . . .

Yes! Asia thought as she opened the office’s back door. She removed the boots, then twisted her feet to press Darrell’s scent into the floor. She took out the flashlight, turned it on, and looked around.

Typical back room of an office. A table and two chairs, the pseudokitchen with its mini fridge and counters. A washroom, and a storage area full of bins of clothes, some clean and some just this side of ripe.

Nothing in the fridge that was useful to her plans. But in the cupboard under the counter, she found what she was looking for: a partially used box of sugar lumps.

Wishing she could turn on a light, Asia put the flashlight on the floor and took the vial out of her pocket. The crystals didn’t look any different from sugar crystals, and from what she’d learned about this stuff, it didn’t taste much different either, which is why it was so effective and the penalties for using it were so high. She tapped crystals over the top layer of sugar lumps, then gently shook the box to coat more of the lumps. She continued doing that until she poured the last crystals over the sugar.

Putting the empty vial back in the coat pocket, she replaced the box of sugar, picked up her flashlight, and went into the next room.

Not much to look at. Who could stand working in such a boring room day after day? There wasn’t even a stack of mail that would give her a few names she didn’t know from the bookstore and coffee shop.

She opened a cupboard and found boxes of dog cookies. For a moment, she regretted using all those crystals on the sugar, then realized it was just as well she hadn’t been able to give in to impulse. If anything happened to a Wolf, it could be seen as an act of war. But she had never heard of Others named Ponygard, which meant the stupid ponies were just animals. They would be a distraction, a way to stir things up, nothing but collateral damage in the overall scheme.

Opening a drawer under the counter, she stared at a sheet of paper for a long moment. Then her heart bumped with excitement. She had found a map of the Courtyard. Gates, roads, buildings—everything the extraction team would need.

Payday!

Pulling Darrell’s shirt over her hand, Asia picked up the map with two fingers and put it on the big table. Then she took out her camera . . . and swore under her breath.

A flashlight and the flash on the camera weren’t going to do it. If she wanted pictures that would be useful, she was going to have to turn on the lights, just for a minute.

No curtains on the window. Nothing she could use quickly to block the light.

Stop stalling, she thought as she waved the flashlight over the walls until she found the light switch. The faster you take the pictures, the faster you can get out of here.

Flipping on the lights, she hurried back to the table and took several shots of the map as the full page, then several more in zoom mode to provide more details. She put the camera in the coat pocket and the map in the drawer, flipped off the lights—and heard an Owl hoot.

Damn, fuck, shit. Was one of them perched on the wall next to the office? Or, worse, perched on the railing of the stairs she needed to climb?

She crept to the back room, put on her boots, opened the outside door, and listened hard. No feathers rustling overhead, no more hooting.

Slipping out the door, she locked it, then turned off the flashlight. Her foot was on the first stair when she thought about the empty vial in her pocket. According to Bigwig, the police presence and the speed in which they responded to anything involving the Others were unusual. That meant an empty vial could be as good as a confession if they found it on her.

Taking the vial out of the coat pocket, she walked a few feet from the stairs and shoved the vial into a snowbank as far as she could. Then she pushed the snow around to cover the hole, brushed off the coat sleeve, and hurried up the stairs.

Stripping out of Darrell’s clothes, she took the clothes she’d worn that evening into the bathroom, along with her overnight case. She had taken a shower with Darrell as part of the foreplay, using the soap and shampoo the Others insisted their employees use. Now she gave her clothes and body a light spritz of the floral scent the Others associated with Asia Crane because she always wore that scent when she went into Howling Good Reads or A Little Bite.

And that scent wasn’t in the Liaison’s Office.

She put everything away and slipped into bed, grateful for the trapped body heat. Darrell was still in a heavy sleep and didn’t do more than grunt and turn away from her when she tried to ease her cold body closer to his warm one.

An hour passed. Then two. She thought about that vial hidden in the snow, where it would hopefully remain until spring. She thought about the camera and the incriminating photos on the camera’s storage card. She thought about how to sever her relationship with Darrell.

She thought about what Asia Crane, SI, would do.

She slipped back out of bed, got dressed, gathered her things, and left. She didn’t give her car enough time to warm up, and she didn’t brush enough snow off the back window before she drove out of the Courtyard. It was late, and there was hardly any traffic. That didn’t mean a cop wouldn’t tag her.

She drove another block before she pulled over and properly cleaned off all the windows. Then she dug her mobile phone out of her overnight case and made a call, but it wasn’t to Bigwig.

“Hello?”

“I need one of your special messengers. Someone who can print some pictures and can also take more personal instructions.”

“He can be at your residence in thirty minutes.”

“I should be back by then.”

Asia ended the call, tucked the phone back in the overnight case, and drove to her apartment. She had chosen the university district because it was close enough to the Courtyard but not one of the neighborhoods that rubbed against the land controlled by the Others. It wasn’t likely that any of them had seen her, except when she visited the stores, so they wouldn’t know where she lived.

It was now very important that they didn’t know where she lived.

When she got home, she barely had time to turn on a couple of lights before there was a soft knock at the door.

The same special messenger who had delivered her present.

“You have something for me?” he asked after he closed the door.

She shucked off her coat and took the camera out of the interior pocket. “I have pictures that can’t be seen by anyone working in a photo shop.”

He waggled the black case he was carrying. “And I have a private way of printing photos.” He walked over to her dining table and began setting up.

She watched him hook up a miniature printing center. “I’ve never seen anything like this. Must cost a bundle.”

“Costs an arm—literally—if it’s lost or damaged, but the benefactor who finances these assignments believes in giving his people the highest-quality equipment, since there are rarely second chances.”

“How can something like this be manufactured without the Others knowing about it?” Asia asked.

He gave her a feral grin. “You can hide all kinds of things from them if you know how. Now. Give me that storage card, and let’s see if what you’ve got is worth that late-night phone call.”

Stung by the implied criticism that she had annoyed an important man for a pittance of information, she popped the storage card out of the camera and handed it to the messenger. He slipped it into one of his little boxes, then clicked on the program that would open the pictures.

He studied them for a minute. Then he whistled softly. “I stand corrected. These are worth a late-night call.” He looked at her with new interest. “Where did you find this?”

“In the Liaison’s Office.”

“How fast do they respond to threats?”

“Fast. And the police respond almost as fast.”

“Damn. They usually drag their heels when a call is about a Courtyard.”

“Not here.” She hesitated. This whole assignment was a lot riskier than anything else she’d done for her backers, and doing work for this benefactor and her backers had its own kinds of risk. But, damn, it was exciting and just the kind of thing Asia Crane, SI, would do.

“I think some distractions, some false alarms, would be smart,” she said, slipping into the role of her alter ego. “Give the police a reason to slow their response time. Create distractions that are nothing but annoyances.”

He began printing the pictures, studying the overall map of the Courtyard while the enlarged images printed. “Small distractions and annoyances close to the gates.” He moved a finger around the area that contained the shops, consulate, and Liaison’s Office. “Activity mostly during the day?”

“And early evening. They don’t keep regular hours like a human business, but most of the businesses are closed by nine p.m.”

“What about this place? The Utilities Complex.”

Asia shook her head. “Don’t know. I’d guess more activity during the day, but I’m not sure if humans are allowed in there.”

“We can find out,” he said absently while he continued to study the map. “Distractions. We can keep them stirred up so they don’t recognize the real threat when it comes.”

“But nothing until after Moonsday.”

He turned his head and studied her. “Why is that?”

“Because I already put the first distraction in motion. And I figure it will happen on Moonsday.”

He finished printing the pictures, even printed out one extra of the overall map for her to keep. After putting his equipment back in its case and sliding the pictures into a manila envelope, he gave her a thorough look—and smiled. “I was told you also needed something more personal.”

“Not that,” she said. “I don’t want anyone’s scent there except the man I was with tonight.”

“Then what are you looking for?”

“Rough me up. Not enough to need a hospital or report it to the police, but enough that other women would understand me wanting to break up with this man—and not come around where he might see me. I need a reason not to be around the Courtyard on Moonsday.”

He narrowed his eyes. “You setting him up?”

“Let’s say he’s going to act as insurance for all of us.”

The messenger gave her body a coldly professional study while he pulled on a pair of thin leather gloves. “Then let’s get started.”