Hard Bitten (8 page)

So I let it go and settled into a comfy position beside her, and then let my mind drift on the waves of prerecorded, trashy television. As relaxation went, it didn’t exactly rank up there with a hotrock massage and mud bath, but a vampire took what a vampire could get.

W
hen I awoke again, I dressed in my personal uniform—jeans and a tank top over high-heeled boots, my Cadogan medal, my sword, and my beeper—and headed out.

I stopped at the House gate, intending to get a sense of the gauntlet I’d have to walk to get to my car. One of the two fairies at the gate guessed my game.

“They are quiet tonight,” he said. “Ethan planned ahead.”

I glanced over at him. “He planned ahead?”

The fairy pointed down the street. I peeked outside the gate, smiling when I realized Ethan’s strategy. A food truck hawking Italian beefs was parked at the corner, a dozen protesters standing beside it, sandwiches in hand, their signs propped against the side of the truck.

Ethan must have made a phone call.

“Hot beef in the name of peace,” I murmured, then hustled across the street to my ride, a boxy orange Volvo. The car was old and had seen better days, but it got me where I needed to go.

Tonight, I needed to go south.

You’d think a name as fancy as

“Ombudsman” (which really meant “liaison”) would have gotten my grandfather a nice office in some fancy city building in the Loop.

But Chuck Merit, cop turned supernatural administrator, was a man of the people, supernatural or otherwise. So instead of a swank office with a river view, he had a squat brick building on the South Side in a neighborhood where the lawns were surrounded by chain-link fences.

Normally, the street was quiet. But tonight, cars spilled across the office’s yard and down the street a couple of blocks. I’d seen my grandfather surrounded by cars before—at his house in the midst of a water-nymph catfight. Those vehicles had been roadsters with recognizable vanity plates; these were beat-up, harddriven vehicles with rusty bumpers and paint splatter.

I parked and made my way across the yard.

The door was unlocked, unusual for the office, and music—Johnny Cash’s rumbling voice—

echoed throughout.

The building’s decor was all 1970s, but the problems were modern and paranormally driven.

So, I assumed, were the boxy men and women who mingled in the hallways, plastic cups of orange drink in hand. They turned and stared at me as I wove through them, their smallish eyes watching as I walked down the hallway. Their features were similar, like they might have been cousins related by common grandparents. All had slightly porcine faces, upturned noses, and apple cheeks.

On my way back to the office Catcher shared with Jeff Christopher—an adorable shifter with mad tech skills and a former crush on me—I passed a large table of fruit: spears of pineapple and red-orange papaya in a watermelon bowl; blood orange slices dotted with pomegranate seeds; and a pineapple shell full of blueberries and grapes. Snacks for the office guests, I assumed.

“Merit!” Jeff’s head popped out from a doorway, and he beckoned me inside. I squeezed through a few more men and women and into the office. Catcher was nowhere in sight.

“We saw you on the security monitor,” Jeff said, moving to the chair behind his bank of computer monitors. His brown hair was getting longer, and nearly reached his shoulders now. It was straight and parted down the middle, and currently tucked behind his ears. Jeff had paired a button-up shirt, as he always did, with khakis, his shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows, presumably to give him room to maneuver over his monstrous keyboard. Jeff was tall and lanky, but what he lacked in mass he more than made up for in fighting skills. He was a shifter, and a force to be reckoned with.

“Thanks for finding me,” I told him. “What’s going on out there?”

“Open house for river trolls.”

Of course it was. “I thought the water nymphs controlled the river?”

“They do. They draw the lines; the trolls enforce them.”

“And the fruit?”

Jeff smiled. “Good catch. River trolls are vegetarians. Fruitarians, really. Offer up fruit and you can lure them out from beneath the bridges.”

“And they prefer not to leave the bridges.”

I glanced back. Catcher stood in the doorway, plate of fruit in hand and, just as Mallory had said, rectangular frames perched on his nose.

They were an interesting contrast with the shaved head and pale green eyes, but they totally worked. He’d gone from buff martial arts expert to ripped smart-boy. The Sentinel definitely approved. I also approved of his typically snarky T-shirt. Today’s read I GOT OUT OF BED FOR

THIS?

“Mr. Bell,” I said, offering a small salute to my former katana trainer. “I like the glasses.”

“I appreciate your approval.” He moved to his desk and began stabbing the fruit with a toothpick.

So, Catcher was a sorcerer, and Jeff was a shifter. Vampires were also represented, at least partly. Because Chicago’s Masters were pretty tight-lipped about House goings-on, my grandfather had a secret vampire employee who offered up information—a vampire I suspected, largely without evidence, was Malik.

“Do they live under the bridges?” I wondered aloud, returning to the trolls.

“Rain or shine, summer or winter,” Catcher said.

“And why the open house? Is that just maintaining good supernatural relations?”

“Now that things are escalating,” Catcher said, frowning as he used the toothpick to push out the seeds from a chunk of watermelon, “we’re working through the phone book. Every population gets a visit—an evening with the Ombudsman.”

“Things are definitely changing,” Jeff agreed.

“Things are getting louder.”

We all looked back as a broad-shouldered river troll with short, ginger hair looked into the office. His wide-set eyes blinked curiously at us.

He didn’t have much neck to speak of, so his entire torso swiveled as he looked us over. A light breeze of magic stirred the air.

“Hey, George,” Catcher said.

George nodded and offered a small wave. “It’s getting louder. The voices. The talk. The winds are changing. There’s anger in the air, I think.”

He paused. “We don’t like it.” He shifted his gaze to me, a question in his eyes: Was I part of the problem? Making the city louder? Adding to the anger?

“This is Merit,” Catcher quietly explained.

“Chuck’s granddaughter.”

Awareness blossomed in George’s expression.

“Chuck is a friend to us. He is . . . quieter than the rest.”

I wasn’t entirely sure what George meant by

“quiet”—I had the sense it meant more to him than simply the absence of sound—but it was clear he meant it as a compliment.

“Thank you,” I said with as much sincerity as I could push into those two words.

George watched me for a moment. Thinking.

Evaluating, maybe, before he finally nodded.

The act seemed to carry more significance than just an acceptance of my thanks—like I’d been approved by him. I nodded back, my act just as significant. We were two paranormal creatures—members of different tribes, but nevertheless linked together by the city’s drama and an Ombudsman trying diligently to stem the tide—accepting each other.

The connection made, George disappeared again.

“Soft-spoken,” I commented when he was gone.

“They are,” Jeff said. “The RTs keep to themselves, except when the nymphs request it.

And even then, they appear, they work the task, and they head back beneath the bridges again.”

“What kind of things do they do?”

Jeff shrugged. “Generally they do the heavy lifting. Playing muscle for a nymph along her chunk of the river if there’s a boundary dispute, maybe enforcing the peace, maybe helping clean up that chunk of the river if the waters are moving too quickly.”

Apparently done with his explanation, Jeff stretched out to straighten a silver picture frame now on one corner of his desk. I’d previously seen the many-tentacled plush doll that sat atop one of his monitors, but the frame was new.

I walked over and peeked around his desk to get a glimpse of the picture. It was a shot of him and Fallon Keene. They’d apparently hit it off when the Keene family—and representatives of the rest of the Packs—had come to Chicago to decide whether to stay in their respective cities or head off to their ancestral home in Aurora, Alaska. The Packs had voted to stay, and the Keene family hadn’t yet returned to their HQ in Memphis. That respite must have given Jeff and Fallon time to get to know each other.

In the picture, Jeff and Fallon stood beside each other in front of a flat brick wall, their fingers intertwined, gazing at each other. And in their eyes—something weighty and important.

Love, already?

“You look very happy,” I told Jeff.

Crimson rose on his cheeks. “Catcher’s giving me crap about moving too fast,” he said, keeping his gaze on the monitors in front of him. “But he’s one to talk.”

“He
is
already living with my former roommate,” I agreed.

“Still in the room,” Catcher said. “And speaking of things in the room, what brings you by?”

“Just the usual door-darkening crap. First item on the agenda—some kind of G.I. Joe–wannabe organization, led by a man named McKetrick.

They set up a roadblock not far from the House.

They had full military gear—combat boots, black clothes, black SUVs without license plates.”

“No black helicopters?” Jeff asked.

“I know, right? McKetrick has styled himself as some kind of human savior from the vampire invasion. He thinks fangs make us a genetic mistake.”

“A mistake he’s going to remedy?” Catcher asked.

I nodded. “Precisely. He says his goal is getting vamps out of Chicago and, I assume, filling that vacuum with his sparkling personality.”

“We’ll do some digging. Find out what we can.” Catcher tilted his head curiously. “How’d you get out of the roadblock?”

“Ethan called our favorite Pack members.

Keene brought the family and then some.”

“Nice,” Jeff said. “Um, was Fallon there?”

“She was. But in a Cardinals cap. Can’t you do something about that?”

He shrugged sheepishly. “I know how to pick my battles. So no. Oh—and did you hear? Tonya had the baby. A nine-pound boy. Connor Devereaux Keene.”

I smiled back at him. Tonya was Gabriel’s wife; she’d been quite pregnant the last time I’d seen her, and they’d already decided on

“Connor” as a name. “Nine pounds? That’s a big boy.”

Jeff smiled knowingly. “That’s what she said.”

Catcher cleared his throat. “What’s the second thing?”

“Raves.”

They both looked up at me.

“What about them?” Catcher asked.

“That was actually my first question. At best, we have raves popping into the public eye—for real this time.”

“And worst?” Catcher asked.

“We have something with the markings of a rave, but that actually involves psycho-vamps committing atrocities against multiple humans.

Three supposed deaths so far, but there’s no physical evidence.”

There was silence in the office.

“You’re serious?” Catcher asked, voice grave.

“Aspen serious.” I gave them the details on Mr. Jackson and his experience, on the mayor’s investigation, and on our visit to his home. It worried me that they didn’t already have these details; my grandfather, after all, was the city’s supernatural Ombudsman. He should have been the first person Tate called.

“Is it because of me?” I asked. “Is Tate keeping information from him because I’m his granddaughter? Because I’m in Cadogan?”

Catcher pushed away his plate of fruit, propped his elbows on the table, and rubbed his temples. “I don’t know, and I really don’t like that idea. But I do know Chuck won’t be pleased at the possibility that we’re a figurehead group, an office Tate keeps open to make sups think he gives a shit—”

“While he’s keeping important information from us,” Jeff finished.

“On the other hand,” Catcher thoughtfully said, “it wouldn’t be our job to investigate.

That’s the role of CPD detectives. But he’d normally give us a heads-up so we could make contact with the Houses or the Rogues.” He shook his head. “We always thought Tate was a little cagey. I guess this proves you have to keep one ear to the ground even when you’re supposedly in the loop.”

“And speaking of keeping an ear to the ground, what’s the word on raves? Anything new in the ether?”

He frowned. “I assumed you’ve talked to Malik or Ethan and you know about the three we tracked?”

“I’ve heard,” I growled out.

With a nod, Catcher rose and went to a whiteboard newly installed on one end of the office, uncapped a green marker, and began writing. Accompanied by the squeak of the pen, he started by drawing what looked like an angled, limp fish.

“What’s that?”

“Chicago,” he said without turning around.

“Seriously? That’s how you represent the city you work for? As a fish?”

“It really does look like a fish,” Jeff said excitedly. “Oh, maybe it’s an Asian carp. Are you making a metaphor about raves and invasive species?”

“Clever,” I said with a smile for Jeff.

He leaned back in his chair, smiling proudly.

“That’s what the ladies say.”

I rolled my eyes and turned back to Catcher, who was glaring at both of us above his Buddy Holly glasses. I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing aloud.

“As I was saying,” he continued, before placing stars on the map in different locations,

“we know about three new raves in the last two months.”

“Intel from the secret vampire?” I wondered aloud.

“Two of them,” Catcher admitted. “The third from Malik. All were second- or thirdhand reports.”

Okay, so that pretty much blew my Malik-is-the-secret-source theory.

“There’s also the rave we visited along the lakeshore,” Catcher added, placing another star on the board.

We didn’t find out about that one until after the rave was over and the vamps had closed up shop. As a result, we only walked away with a guess about the number of attendees and a clue as to who’d also investigated—the Red Guard and a shifter we later learned had been our blackmailer.