Steal the Light (Thieves) (14 page)

* * * *

I turned off the shower and tried to shake the memories. I shivered since the shower had gone cold a while back, but I hadn’t noticed until now. I’d been lost in the memory of the last time Daniel and I were happy. Years had passed since that moment when they hauled him from my arms, but I was still stuck there.

The thought of Dev crossed my mind. Dev was a different road, one that might not have closed yet. Was I brave enough to give it a real try?

I pushed open the door to the shower and wrapped myself in a towel. There was a clean T-shirt sitting on the countertop along with a first aid kit, and I wondered if Daniel had heard me crying. The wound in my shoulder had bled profusely but it wasn’t really deep. It didn’t need more than antibiotic cream and a square bandage. I pulled the T-shirt over my head and went about the business of drying my hair. The night weighed on me, and my earlier adrenaline rush fled a long time ago. It was only now that I wondered exactly where Daniel was planning on putting me. I knew there was only one bedroom, and if he thought I was taking the couch, he had another think coming.

I opened the door to the bedroom and indeed there was a man on the bed, but it wasn’t Daniel.

“I have chocolate chip or peanut butter.” Neil held up two bags of cookies. He was dressed in pajamas that Dick Van Dyke might have worn. They were a pale blue and I would have sworn he’d had them pressed. “Daniel called me and told me to get my ass over here. Rude, much? Anyway, he’s sleeping in a body bag in the den and I’m supposed to be making sure you don’t do anything stupid tomorrow like leave the apartment.”

So Daniel had brought in reinforcements. “You’re supposed to babysit me? I should warn you, unless you plan on tying me up, I’m leaving in the morning.”

His eyes lit up. “Cool, what are we going to do?”

I laughed as I sat on the bed. “You’re a crappy babysitter.”

“I know. It’s like letting the fox watch the chickens. I have no idea what he was thinking.” Neil’s eyes were wide with incredulity. “The whole time he was talking I was thinking about all the things we could do after we stole his credit cards.”

I found it difficult to remain morose around Neil. “We’re not stealing his credit cards. We’re going to find out who tried to kill me and deal with them. You don’t have to go with me. I really don’t need a babysitter.”

Neil thought about that for a minute, his eyes turning serious. He reached out and covered my hand with his. He’d only worked with me for a little over a year, but we’d become close. “I know I come off as superficial, and I am on most levels. Don’t try to deny it. I’m all right with it. I like pretty things and pretty people, and I like to look at myself. But there’s more to me than that. I would never let you go off like that all by yourself. I don’t have family anymore, not the blood kind. They tossed me out a long time ago. The way I see it, you and Sarah and Daniel are all I have. I like to think of you as a sister, Zoey. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is I’ve got your back. I won’t let you down, or if I do it’ll be because I died trying. Of course, I’ll look damn good while I do it.”

For the second time that night, I teared up, but this time Neil was there with cookies and a shoulder to cry on.

Chapter Nine

The next morning, I sat across from Neil at a diner near my apartment. Daniel had seriously underestimated the not so delicate balance between a werewolf’s loyalty and a werewolf’s seemingly endless gut. Neil had been the one to lead the charge out the door the minute we discovered that Daniel’s kitchen was beautiful and elegant and utterly devoid of food.

Neil did not do well without food.

Neil ordered pancakes, bacon, sausage, a Denver omelet, biscuits and gravy, and a cheeseburger. I requested a half a grapefruit and an English muffin, but then I didn’t have that good old werewolf hyper-metabolism. Daniel couldn’t have been thinking straight when he ordered Neil to keep me in all day. Neil couldn’t go more than a couple of hours without a side of beef or he dissolved into a whiny ball of Ralph Lauren sportswear.

I was glad for the sportswear, though. Without Neil’s blazer covering my sadly worn dress, I’m afraid I would have attracted a lot of attention. I’d gotten most of the blood out, but there was still a nice hole where the flying stake had gotten through.

“So what’s the plan?” Neil asked as he dug into his über breakfast.

I didn’t have to ask which plan he was talking about. It was the plan that kept me up most of the night and well into morning.

“I have a few hours until Daniel wakes up. Halfer isn’t answering his phone.”

Neil shook his head. “But aren’t you supposed to be able to contact him?”

That was the million dollar question. “Maybe he knows I want to give him the money back. Maybe if I give back every penny, I can get out of this contract. I’ll even hand over all the plans we’ve made to the next crew he finds.”

“But Daniel already got the uniforms and everything,” Neil whined slightly around an enormous mouth of pancakes.

“And I’m sure the new crew will be thrilled with his hard work. I intend to be as helpful as possible to whoever comes after.” I took a slow sip of my coffee. “But I have to find the fucker first. I talked to Albert first thing this morning. He thinks he can have a name by this afternoon.”

“So you get Halfer’s real name, you call him to your hand, you give back the cash, and then Daniel won’t shove you into a bomb shelter somewhere.” Neil neatly summed up my plan.

“Yep.” It was a good plan. It was a plan that would probably fail, and I would still end up in said bomb shelter or wherever vampires shoved their troublesome ex-lovers. But I was determined to try.

“I thought I would find you here.” Sarah walked up to our booth. She smiled and sat beside me, pulling me into a slightly awkward half hug. “I tried your apartment, but no one was there.”

“We spent the night at Daniel’s,” Neil said between bites.

Sarah’s eyes went wide. “Seriously? He’s been back for two years, and he’s never invited anyone back to his place. What’s it like?”

“Very clean,” I said.

“Boring,” Neil said at the same time.

Nothing at all like my Daniel. But then he wasn’t mine anymore. “I bet the rest of the apartments in the building look exactly alike. Vamps don’t seem big on individuality.”

Neil’s eyes lit up as he looked at Sarah. “Daniel’s apartment is bland, but our night wasn’t.”

He launched into a recounting of the events from the night before, but my mind was still on Daniel.

I spent a lot of time the night before thinking about that apartment. It was cold and impersonal. It was aesthetically pleasing in an
Architectural Digest
way, but there was nothing of the owner reflected in the home. The neatness of it bothered me, too. Daniel had been many things, but neat was not one of them. I had no rosy reflections of living with Daniel. He’d been a slob. The corner of the apartment where he had his desk had always been an intricate disaster area.

It was a miracle he’d been able to get out the door with books in hand most mornings. It annoyed me at times. Daniel’s brain was just wired differently. He could take a subject he knew nothing about and become a near expert in a short time. College had been like Disney World for Daniel.

There hadn’t been a single book in his apartment. I guess that bugged me most of all.

“Tell me you didn’t eat the bear.” Sarah, the vegan, shivered at the thought.

Neil simply grinned. “Well, he was trying to kill me at the time.”

Sarah’s voice came out on a huffy little breath. “Do you know how close some bears are to going on the endangered species list?”

Neil snorted, a sound he made elegant. “Sarah, he wasn’t some polar bear. He was a schmo from Jersey from the sound of his accent.”

“Well, I don’t think that gives you the right to eat him,” Sarah said primly. Today she was wearing a vintage Clash T-shirt over a micro-mini and brilliant purple tights. A sassy beret covered her shock of pink hair. She turned her attention to me, and her expression changed. Her dark eyes glittered. “Speaking of horribly murdering people, how was your date with the man I’m going to kill? I hope you enjoyed it because I have a few things to say to him the next time we meet.”

“He was really sorry, Sarah.” With everything that happened last night, I managed to forget how humiliated Sarah had been. “His name is Dev, and he feels awful about the whole thing. He’s actually a really nice guy. He’s just not that great at magic.”

“I looked like an idiot. I actually drooled, Z,” she complained. “He made my mouth water. Daniel had to stop me from chasing after him. I also wanted to kill you for taking my man. I thought of him as ‘my man’ like I was stuck in a Tammy Wynette song. Do you know how humiliating that is for a feminist?”

“Again with the sorry.” I wasn’t sure what else to say. I would have been angry, too. But I wanted to see Dev again, and I didn’t want to worry about Sarah murdering him.

Sarah’s brown eyes narrowed as she thought about her problem. “You know, the most brilliant witches are almost always female. There’s something about the female psyche that lends itself to witchcraft. Can you imagine the hexes they created and what those hexes can do to a penis? Have you ever seen one twist into a pretzel?”

“Ouch!” Neil waggled a finger her way. “You don’t want to do that to him. He’s really cool and super rich. He also just happens to own Ether.”

“The club you were at was Ether? OMFG!” Sarah was squealing now, and I felt old. Though I was only a few years older than the pair across from me, sometimes their ability to switch gears emotionally shocked me.

“Good, so you leave his penis in the proper shape, and I’ll make sure you get into Ether. That is if it’s still standing after the number we did on it last night.” Albert had only told me that Dev was alive and still asleep. It made sense. He ran a nightclub. I was lucky Albert was an early riser.

“I’ve been trying to get into that place since it first opened. Everyone says it’s awesome. If you can get me on the list, I will take that as a favor.” She smiled, and I could see she was already thinking about what she would wear and what color she should dye her hair. “By the way, I did you a favor, silly girl. You totally forgot to lock your door. It was wide open when I got there this morning. I was a little surprised since you’re usually so careful. It’s okay, though. I locked it on my way out. It didn’t look like anything was missing, not that you have much anyone would want. Have you seen that TVs don’t need rabbit ears anymore?”

Sarah kept talking, but I shoved my way out of the booth, my brain hanging on one thought. Someone opened my apartment door. Daniel wouldn’t have left it unlocked. No way. No how. He was careful, ruthlessly so.

I slammed out of the diner and crossed the street at a dead run, desperate to get to my apartment.

A thief can never be too careful. Given our internal knowledge of how many crappy things can come between a person and said person’s prized possessions, one might think a thief would be particularly careful about security. One would normally be right.

On any regular night, I have what I like to call my security ritual. It consists of securing several doors with a variety of locks. There are three deadbolts, two keyless, and another two security chains. The chains aren’t really meant to keep anyone out as even a human could simply kick through them, but the actual chains themselves are made of silver and built to burst on impact, hopefully hitting whoever decided it was a good idea to kick in my door. There are several wards in my apartment meant to keep out various and sundry undesirables. Sarah even set up one on my front door that made humans wary about knocking. It made it hard to get pizza delivered, but on the plus side the Jehovah’s Witnesses stopped pestering me.

There was a separate ward on my bedroom, and I knew for a fact that I didn’t take it off or knock it down before I left the night before. I placed the ward on my bedroom door because when I had something important, I kept it under my bed. My father made fun of my hiding place, but it was more complex than just shoving something in between the mattress and floor and hoping no one glanced there looking for dust bunnies. My heavy antique four-poster sat on a thick rug. If someone managed to push aside the bed and roll up the rug, they would have to look for the seams in the wood to find the door that leads to my safe.

That safe was my baby. I spent everything I had on it. It was custom made, with three-inch thick steel walls and nylon wheels to make the noise of the serrated tumbler wheels almost soundless. I eschewed electronic devices in favor of solid structure. I picked this apartment because of its placement on the first floor.

When I moved here, Daniel helped me rip up the flooring and tear up the foundation to install the safe. Sarah and Neil knew the safe existed, but only Danny, my father, and I knew the combo.

There was five hundred thousand dollars in that safe right now. My hands shook as I opened the door to my apartment. There was no way anyone could find the safe, much less open it and take the contents. I said this over and over like a silent prayer.