Necromancing Nim (11 page)

Colin led the way into the living room and draped himself over the huge leather sofa that dominated the room. Sebastian already sat at the other end of it, laptop balanced on his thighs, and shifted a little to make room for Colin’s feet. The house was overly dim for my tastes, though this didn’t seem to bother Colin. Not being a vampire, though, I found the semidarkness problematic.

“Turn on a fucking light,” I grumped and turned on a fucking light to see both vampires regarding me with smirky bemusement. Which is to say Sebastian was bemused and Colin was smirky.

“Must be tough, not being able to see in the dark,” Colin commented.

With the light on, I could finally make out my surroundings. It was a sprawling, intimidating sort of house, with huge log supports accenting a vaulted ceiling. A wide bay window filled the back wall, facing the mountains. Probably a spectacular view that Colin, being nocturnal, never had a chance to appreciate. He could see in the dark, though, so I could have been wrong on that.

“So where were you?” I prodded again.

“Went to get Sebastian something to eat. Came back here, cops were just showing up to search the place. Don’t even know how they got a damn warrant. Your laws, they are stupid.” He rubbed his eyes wearily and laid his head on the armrest. I wondered where the hell I was supposed to sit, since he and Sebastian had spread themselves all over the couch. Then I registered what he’d said.

“You were here when the cops were here?”

“Yeah. I followed them around to be sure they didn’t fuck with anything.”

There was a rocking chair next to the fireplace; I perched on it gingerly, hoping I didn’t need permission, since Colin hadn’t granted it. “Ah. You whammied them.”

“Yeah.” He sounded bored by the whole concept. He poked Sebastian in the ass with his toe. “You getting anything?”

“Nope.” Sebastian directed his answer to the laptop rather than to Colin. “Roland has a new lead—she’s following up and will get back to me.”

Colin made a dissatisfied grunt.

“These things take time.” Sebastian clicked the laptop shut and turned his attention to me, offering a weary smile. “I’ve got some friends doing research for me out of state.”

I smiled back, appreciating his attention and the attempted explanation. The smile seemed to soften the harsh burn lines on his face. I wanted to reach out and touch him, trace the burns gently, hoping it might help his pain. His eyes darkened, and for a moment, we shared, well, a moment. Of course, then Colin felt it necessary to speak.

“Hasn’t she been working on this since, like, eighteen forty-seven or something?”

Sebastian’s mouth tightened. “Something like that.”

“Really?” I put in. “That long? How long has this stone been around anyway?”

“Nobody knows for sure,” Sebastian said. “That’s one of the things we’re trying to find out.” He cast Colin a sidelong glance as if daring him to interrupt again. “Research on mystical objects is never an easy undertaking. Especially the really powerful ones. Most of the vital information is passed by word of mouth to a select group, and if they’re taken out of the picture, the knowledge is lost.”

“This one’s been under tight wraps for centuries.” The irritation had faded from Colin’s voice. Maybe he was finally willing to admit things were complicated and not immediately solvable through heavy application of sarcasm. “Understandable, considering what it does.”

“What exactly does it do?” I had to ask, though I was certain they’d dodge the question again, as they had last night.

I was right. Colin just stared at me blankly. Sebastian softened, though, and he said, “The less you have in your head, the less likely it is that somebody will try to kill you for it. Honestly. This is big. It’s better if we keep you protected, and lack of knowledge is the best way to do that right now.”

I remained skeptical but was willing to go along for the most part if it meant not getting killed. I had to push, though. It’s in my nature. “So, who’s Pieter?”

“Pieter,” Colin said tightly, “would be the bad guy.”

“I see. So I don’t want to meet him.”

“No, you really don’t.” Colin levered himself back up to a sitting position, laboriously, as if it took far more energy than a gazillion-year-old vampire could possibly muster on such short notice. “What did you tell them at work? I mean about where you were going?”

“I told Kim Rufus was sick and I needed to run home.”

Colin actually looked impressed. “Good. Why don’t you run back? Sebastian has some stuff he needs searches run on, and I don’t want to do it from here. We’ve got better firewalls at the office, and I know you know how to cover your tracks.” The odd surge of pride that followed his comments was quashed by his next one. “Otherwise it wouldn’t be so damn hard to hunt up all those smutty blogs you read on your lunch break.”

“Why do you care what I read on my lunch break?” I snapped back, annoyed that he’d made me feel proud and humiliated in the same thirty seconds.

“He likes to read them too,” Sebastian put in. Colin made a face at him but didn’t protest. I went from humiliated to amused. And kind of creeped out. “Anyway…” Sebastian continued. He rose from the couch, the movement awkward, and walked to a table toward the back of the room, just on the edge of the circle of light cast by the single lamp I’d flipped on. I could see now that there was a printer there, a stack of papers in the print tray. He picked them up and arranged them into a neat pile. “Here’s a list of what I want done. Make hard copies of everything you find—don’t e-mail it to me or bookmark it anywhere.”

“And clear out the cache and the history and the registry and anything else I can think of when I’m done?”

Handing me the pile of papers, Sebastian gave an approving nod. “You got it.”

“Wipe the whole fucking hard drive, even,” Colin added. “Shove a goddamn magnet in it.”

“Seriously?” Sebastian sounded as taken aback as I felt, but as Colin nodded, he resumed his seat on the couch and scratched his sun-scarred chin reflectively. “Probably best to cover our tracks as thoroughly as possible.”

“That’s what I’m thinking,” Colin agreed. “Everything important to the business on my computer is backed up externally or on Kim’s computer. Do what you need to do; then you can just reformat the hard drive. Or pull it out, if you know how to do that.”

I swallowed. That directive, more than anything else that had happened, made my stomach sink. A sick, frightened feeling rushed through me. Whatever was going down, it was serious. I didn’t like being involved in things that were overly serious. Especially things that could end with me overly dead. “Okay,” I said. “And then bring the papers back here?”

“No,” said Sebastian. “There are instructions in the folder. Put them in an envelope and mail them to the address listed there. Oh, and then shred the instructions. And go home. You’ll be safer there than anywhere anybody might think to look for us. We’ll get in touch when we have a better idea what’s going on.”

“Wow. Major intrigue.” This was getting spookier by the minute. “I’ll take care of it.”

“Good.” Colin leaned back again, stretching his legs out so his feet bumped back against Sebastian’s thigh. The casual touching was more than a little odd, I thought. “I knew I could count on you.”

The sudden spate of compliments from him was even odder. I stared at the papers in my hands. “I guess I’ll go, then.”

“Yep,” said Colin. “Get the hell out of here.”

I got the hell out of there and drove back to the office. If I’d known two years ago, when I’d taken this job, that I’d end up shredding documents and reformatting hard drives, I might have opted to keep looking, or settle for a job flipping burgers. Or, God forbid, go back to college like my parents had wanted me to. But no, I’d opted for the job with the decent salary and benefits. Silly me.

Kim jumped when I barreled through the door. Hard not to be jumpy after an encounter with the cops.

“How’s the dog?” she asked. I thought it was nice of her to have remembered, considering how the evening was going so far.

“Okay, but I need to head back out. Gonna grab some work and go home.”

She nodded. I continued on my way into Colin’s office, figuring if I appeared to be on official business, nobody would question me. Mitch and Terry were in by now too, and the phones had started ringing, so Kim was likely not to care what I did.

Locking Colin’s office door behind me, I sorted through the pages Sebastian had given me and got to work. It was an odd assortment of tasks—several searches for information that seemed random to me, an e-mail to be sent to a University of Illinois address, more searching through a U of I archive that required a login and password to access. The text of the e-mail was written out in the papers and appeared to be either random characters, some sort of code, or a strange foreign language. Possibly all of the above. Whatever the case, I didn’t understand any of it and just transcribed everything exactly as it appeared. The sheets I printed out from the archive were similarly incomprehensible, and over half the searches led to sites in foreign languages. The ones I could read seemed to be crazed conspiracy-theory shit—some particularly virulent anti-vampire hate speech about how they’re all organized into secret societies planning to bring about the apocalypse, and they’d started by killing Jesus, Joan of Arc and John F. Kennedy. I didn’t question it—just printed it all out and tried not to read any of it for fear of getting unfathomably angry. Vampires weren’t demons. My dad had written a book about it and made me read it.

When I was done with the web searches, I cleared out the history, the registry and all my cache and cookies. And then, per instructions, set the hard drive to reformat. Hopefully, nobody would mess with the computer before it was done committing suicide. I turned off the monitor so anyone who glanced in would think the machine was powered down. Not much else I could do there. I stuffed the new papers into an envelope, addressed it, stole postage from Colin’s stamp stash, then shredded the sheaf of instructions.

Intrigue accomplished to the best of my ability, I headed back out. Kim, significantly more relaxed now and also flirting with Terry as usual, wished Rufus well as I hurried out. I stuffed the bulging envelope into the mailbox just outside the building, then went back to my car.

Go home, they’d said. It didn’t seem right. There had to be something else I needed to do, something I was forgetting. Something they were forgetting. Something else I could do to help. A sick, wavery sensation fluttered around in my stomach. I didn’t know what to do about it. Maybe there wasn’t anything to do about it. But I wanted to help. I was starting to feel invested, and not just because Colin was my boss and Sebastian had saved me, more or less.

Truth was, I was starting to think Colin wasn’t such a bad guy under all his severity and bluster. And Sebastian—well, I kind of liked him, honestly. And I wanted to be sure they both got out of this—whatever it was—without undue damage. And that I got out of it too.

But I didn’t know what else to do, other than what they’d asked of me. With no other ideas presenting themselves, I started my car and headed home.

I spent the drive home unfocused, distracted by the raindrops on the window, the sound of the wipers, lint, dust motes floating through the car. Finally, I turned the radio to a random rock station and cranked it up loud enough to vibrate the seats.

At home, still feeling a little off-kilter, I parked the car and headed inside. But stopped in front of my front door. The door jamb right next to the lock was splintered.

I stared at it, processing what I was seeing. Somebody had broken into my house. Shit, I thought, then repeated it out loud. “Shi—”

Someone grabbed me from behind, arm wrapping around my neck, a chilly wrist pressing against my windpipe. I didn’t have time to grab my squirt gun or pepper spray or even to react other than to make a gurgling noise and claw at the arm half strangling me as the vamp shoved me into the house. Breath moved past my ear, smelling unpleasantly of raw meat. Dude needed breath spray or something. Or to quit breathing. He didn’t need to, so what the fuck with the halitosis all over my face?

“Where is it?” a voice growled.

“What?” I could barely get the word out. Apparently whoever it was had an interest in my answer, because he eased up the pressure on my neck.

“You know what.”

“I have no fucking idea what, you moron.” Probably not the best answer, but this was really pissing me off. I was more angry than afraid, and instinct took over. I stomped backward, catching his kneecap with my heel. He squeaked like a six-year-old girl, and his grip on my neck loosened enough for me to grab my squirt gun and pump a round of holy water into his face. Screaming obscenities, he backed off, smacking into my living room wall and sending a picture crashing to the floor.

“Stupid fuck,” I snarled. Then another pair of hands grabbed me and swung me around. I looked straight into bared fangs and harsh, angry eyes. Then the vampire whipped his head forward like a snake. Pain tore through my neck, and everything went black.

The blood flows freely.

A drop of finest garnet

Kisses her white neck.