Immortal Moon (15 page)

Everyone chatted and joked as we ate. Even
Farrah, who was often quiet and introverted, joined in the laughter
and conversation. Everything was fine until River was serving the
cake and a buzzing sounded.

“Fiona, is that your porta-scry? You know
it’s not allowed at the table during family night,” Pinky said,
disapprovingly.

“I know, sorry. I’m working a case. I’ll be
right back,” she said hastily, pulling out the scry-crystal and
going into kitchen for privacy.

She came out a few minutes later, tucking
the porta-scry back into her pocket.

Pinky let out a much-put-upon sigh. “Are you
going to have to rush out even before dessert?”

She stopped at his chair and kissed him on
the cheek before going back to her own seat. “No, cranky pants, I
don’t have to leave. Not yet, anyway. I’ve got some time to kill,
but I will have to leave after cake.”

No one said anything else about Fiona’s call
and the meal resumed. Once the carrot cake had been decimated and
nothing remained but crumbs, Fiona said, “That was delicious, Rivs.
Pinky, I really am sorry, but I’ve got to run. I may not get
another chance like the one that just fell in my lap.”

Pinky sighed. “No problem, you go catch your
bad guys. Be careful,” he said, kissing her on the cheek before
retreating into the kitchen with a stack of dirty dishes.

Ian said his goodbyes and left, after first
kissing Fiona and giving her the same “Be careful” message as
Pinky.

Jarrett and I were leaning against the bar
when she came over to us. “So, you have any plans for the next
couple of hours besides warming a barstool and watching my sister
serve drinks?” she asked Jarrett.

He laughed. “I’m guessing I do now. You need
some back up?”

“Nothing major, just some surveillance, but
a little company never hurt. You don’t mind, do you, An?”

I shook my head. “Nah. You two go have
fun.”

“It’s not fun, An, it’s work,” Fiona
protested.

I laughed and rolled my eyes. “For you it’s
the same thing. Both of you.”

Jarrett nodded, and Fiona laughed and said,
“You aren’t wrong, sister. So, Jarrett, are you in?”

“Lead on, my friend,” he said. Halfway to
the door he stopped, came back and kissed me until my blood hummed.
“I’ll see you later,” he whispered in my ear, turned, and followed
Fiona out.

Once they were gone, River went up to the
roof to work in her garden, Farrah and Pinky went in the kitchen to
clean up the dinner dishes, and I started preparing to open the pub
for the night’s business. Shortly before opening time, the door
swung open. I turned to tell whoever it was they’d have to come
back and came face-to-face with a tall, muscular man with dark,
creamy skin.

“Luca, hi,” I greeted with a smile. “What
are you doing here so early?”

“I just wanted to stop by and make sure your
leg was doing okay. No pain or weakness?”

I hopped up and down on the leg in question.
“Nope. It’s as good as new.”

“Why would your leg have pain and weakness?”
Pinky’s voice sounded from behind me.

Damn vampire hearing.

I sighed and Luca grimaced.

“Sorry,” he said.

“It’s okay,” I said. Then I turned to Pinky
and explained what had happened the night before. I hadn’t wanted
to tell him, but I wasn’t going to lie now that he knew something
was up.

I could see the silent fury in his eyes, but
his voice was calm and steady when he asked Luca what the injury
had been and how severe.

Luca explained about the tear and how he’d
healed it. Then, at Pinky’s insistence, he checked it out again,
just to make sure it was healed completely and properly. Once he’d
pronounced my leg in perfect shape, he said he had to head to work
and left.

The door swung shut behind him, and Pinky
rounded on me.

“Damn it, Anya, we’ve discussed this.” He
slammed his hand down on the bar to punctuate his words, and I was
surprised it didn’t shatter. “I know you are a big girl and you can
take care of yourself, but you take risks. Yes, you are an amazing
fighter, but you are reckless. You were lucky it was just a torn
muscle last night. One wrong move, one wrong twist or bad landing
and you are either paralyzed or worse. You are strong, but your
body is fragile. I wouldn’t object to you participating in the
fights at Pete’s if you didn’t take so many fool chances.”

I stood there quietly for a long moment,
letting him say his piece and let out his frustration, and then I
said, “I know. You’re right on every count. But you don’t have to
worry. I think I’m going to be fighting a lot less in the
future.”

He stared at me open mouthed. “You actually
sounded like you meant that. Did you finally get hurt bad enough
last night to scare you?”

“Actually, no,” I answered truthfully.
“After I was healed, Jarrett and I had a long talk about why I
fight. And I told him about my life before you found me.”

“I’ve never known you to talk about that
with anyone,” Pinky said, his expression softening.

“I haven’t. But doing so made me realize
that I sometimes push boundaries when I’m fighting just to prove to
myself that I can take care of myself no matter what. That no one
will ever have the power to hurt me without me hurting them
worse.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” Pinky said, his voice sad.
“I always guessed it was something like that, but I had no idea how
to make you see it. I just hoped you would come to it on your
own.”

I smiled at him. “I did, with Jarrett’s
help. And I know I’ve said this before, but I really mean it this
time. I’m not going to promise to stop fighting, because, let’s
face it, I like it. It’s fun. But I really will be smarter about
the opponents I choose and stop taking crazy risks.”

“If Jarrett got you to say all that and
really mean it, I might need to give that man a kiss.”

“Don’t even think about it,” I said,
laughing.

He gave me a pleading look. “Not even a
little peck? He looks like he’d be an excellent kisser.”

“He is, and he’s off limits,” I said,
unnecessarily. Pinky’s sexual appetites might be fluid, but he
never hit on a man that he didn’t know would appreciate his
advances, and he would never make a move on someone one of us was
involved with.

He gave an over-blown sigh. “Oh, okay. I
guess I’ll just have to do with a hug from my favorite middle
daughter.”

“Gladly,” I said, letting him pull me into a
warm, tight embrace.

After a long moment, he pulled away. “Okay,
enough of that. We open the doors to the thirsty hordes in twenty
minutes. Let’s finish getting set up.”

“Okay, boss,” I said and went back to
stacking glasses behind the bar.

“So,
what’s the plan?” Jarrett asked.

He and Fiona had left Pinky’s Pub and were
strolling through the early evening crowd on Broadway towards the
docks.

“We’re going to have a couple of drinks,”
she told him.

He shot her a sideways look. “I’m going to
take a wild guess that you didn’t fake that call and aren’t trying
to sneak away from Ian for a few hours. And I know we aren’t off to
have an illicit tryst. So, care to let loose a little more
info?”

“Wow, you’re quick on your feet.” She
muttered a couple of words that Jarrett knew were a spell that
would keep anyone near them from overhearing their
conversation.

“As I said, surveillance. There’s a new drug
floating around. There have been two deaths in as many weeks. As
far as we can tell it isn’t wide spread, yet. I have an informant
who bartends at a dive bar down by the docks. A friend told him he
had a line on where he could get his hands on a top-notch high. And
he knew the guy was looking for local dealers.”

“Your informant is a dealer? I thought you
guys were pretty good at keeping a lid on the illegal drug market
inside the city.”

“We are. He got busted for selling Juice a
while back.”

Jarrett made a face and shivered. “Uck.
Shifter blood. That is nasty shit, but not illegal to use.”

“No, but it’s illegal to sell if it isn’t
your own blood. Mostly to deter people from kidnapping shifters and
draining them dry,” she said. “You know, you drink blood to live,
how can you cringe at shifter blood?”

“Because, I got some by accident once. I was
sick for a week. It might make mages and norms stronger and hyped
up for a while, but it’s the only thing I know of that can make a
vampire vomit. I hadn’t felt so bad since I had a stomach virus
when I was a young boy.” Jarrett said, the memory making him a
little queasy.

“Anyway, my guy tells his buddy he’s looking
to make a little extra cash and asks if he can hook him up. When
the buddy told him the distributor is giving away the first batch
to new dealers, my guy knew something was off and called me.”

“Giving away product isn’t very profitable,”
Jarrett said. “I don’t blame the guy for thinking something smelled
funny. Why do you suppose someone is giving away free drugs?”

“Like I said, it’s a dive. It caters to dock
workers and sailors. Not exactly a sucker hangout, but bloodsucking
and drug use is overlooked. If I were a drug manufacturer and
wanted to test my product, somewhere like that would be the perfect
laboratory.”

“And apparently it’s not the first testing
field.”

“No. Both deaths have been in similar bars
around the city. The first one we didn’t catch as a drug death.
There were elements of vampire saliva in the blood, but no recent
bite marks. The same thing was found in the second death, but this
time the boy had never been bitten. No scars. And his friend said
he drank a vial of something someone had given him a little while
before he freaked out and started throwing chairs, and then had a
heart attack. His friends didn’t know who gave him the vial.” Fiona
said, keeping her voice low as they walked.

“A drug made with vampire saliva? Could that
be possible?” Jarrett asked, incredulous.

She shook her head. “I don’t know. That’s
one of the many things we need to find out. My informant, Carl, had
his buddy set up a meeting with the distributor. He’s supposed to
get a sample of the goods to see if he wants to deal them in his
bar.”

“So no full deal going down? You can’t
arrest on a sample,” Jarrett said.

She shot him a grin. “We aren’t arresting,
we’re observing. The meet will go down in public, and then we’ll
trail the guy and see what we can find out. The main objective is
getting a sample to analyze. If possible, trace the guy back to his
base of operations. But the key is observation. We can’t make any
arrests until whatever he is selling can be analyzed and classified
as an illegal drug. To do that, we have to connect that drug to the
substance found in our two victims.”

“Got it. So, we’re just a couple out on the
town?” He looked down at his clothes, and then over at Fiona’s.
They were dressed nearly identically in black leather pants and
vests, and combat boots. The only difference was their shirts. “Are
we going to be able to pull that off?”

“At the bar we’re going to, yeah. But, just
in case, let me make an adjustment,” she said.

As they walked, she pulled the drawstring
out of her tunic and tugged the fabric so that it fell down, baring
the tops of her shoulders. With another tug, the material just
barely peeked out of the top of her tight leather vest, revealing
an ample amount of cleavage. Then she took the ribbon out of the
end of her braid and ran her fingers through her hair, shaking out
the long, dark locks.

She stopped and turned to him, hands on her
hips. “What do you think?”

He ran his gaze over her; she was definitely
a knockout, even dressed to kick ass. With her hair wild and her
cleavage popping out, she could make almost any man’s mouth water.
“I think if Ian could see you right now, he’d try to kick my
ass.”

She laughed. “I’ll take that as a
compliment,” she said and resumed walking.

They walked over the bridge and to an area
on the opposite side of the bridge from the market and Pete’s Fight
House. The area was full of warehouses and small, dirty buildings
and sat between the land dedicated to the docking platforms and the
docks. It wasn’t the most desirable location in the city.

“We’re here,” Fiona said.

She pointed to a small, squat building
between a busy warehouse and a rowdy fight house. It was dirty and
looked as if it hadn’t been painted in a quarter century. The
shabby sign on the door read ‘Wet Willy’s Bar.’

Jarrett let out a snort of laughter. “Wet
Willy? Seriously?”

Fiona gave him a curious look. “What is so
funny?”

“Wet Willy,” he laughed. “There are too many
jokes to choose just one.”

She stared at him blankly.

He let out a sigh as his laughter faded.
“And I guess every one of them is a couple of centuries past your
time. Way to make me feel old, Moon.”