On auto-drive, the vehicle moved silently out of the parking lot and into the night. I didn’t envy the two men the next few hours.
I also didn’t envy the coming tongue-lashing about getting myself and my friends into trouble. Being treated like a twelve-year-old when I was twenty-eight and a grown-assed woman was embarrassing. But it was also totally deserved.
Corry was asleep in the passenger seat of the Scorpion. I wasn’t strong enough to lift her, and I needed to get her out of here.
KeeKee, pink Afro bobbing, and Lissa raced up, bright in Walter’s headlights, our jackets and bags in their hands, their mouths still open. Yeah. Walter was something to behold, half his face gorgeous, the other half branded with the initialsWY. Their eyes followed his auto-electric car until it vanished over the slight hill.
Then my friends were all over me, babbling questions, wantingto know who Mr. Beautiful was, and what had happened, and jibber jabber I couldn’t and wouldn’t answer.
“KeeKee,” Berky rumbled, “pull up your car. You gals get your asses out of here.” He pointed at me. “Take the magic shit with you. Police are on the way. And restart my fucking cams.”
“Your cameras are out?” I asked.
It was hard to tell in the dark, but the big guy might have rolled his eyes. “Magic shit and a dead Scorpion? Yeah. Everything’s out. You did it. You fix it. My job’s on the line, here.”
Well, dang.That meant Walter had alerted my little brother, EJ, when the fracas first started, probably from the moment Labaka left the stage to follow me. My disruptor had a limited sphere of interference and no way had it affected the Kegs’s cams. My overprotective little brother, EJ, had no concept of personal space or personal boundaries when any possibility of danger was involved. The Witch War, when demons were used as weapons by witch-vamps, had stolen all that.
With Walter running the security show and EJ as my business partner, I had less privacy now than I did when I lived under the queen’s thumb. And then my ex’s thumb. Freedom was a ghost, drifting close but never really grasped.
While Berky rolled the former attackers over and handcuffed them, I collected, deactivated, and replaced the amulets in my pockets. Except the amulet that been flung into the dark. Thestasisworking had a limited life-span and looked like ordinary gravel, so I wasn’t worried.
“You may a’ given all your magic secrets away, Baby Girl,” KeeKee said.
“I know,” I said, weariness settling on my shoulders like lead weights. “I know. But I wasn’t going to let them take Corry.”
“Fuck no. Fuck that shit and the horse they rode in on,” KeeKee said.
I barked a single note of startled laughter. It changed over to a belly laugh, as KeeKee’s car glided to us on auto and the doors opened. She slid behind the wheel.
“A little help here?” I asked Berky, smothering my chuckles. “Corry’s out cold.”
“I gotchur girl,” he said, opening the Scorpio’s passenger door and gently easing Corry out, carrying her like a sleeping child.
Lissa climbed in back of KeeKee’s vehicle and held out her arms for her friend. “I’ll take her, Berkley.”
Berky stopped, still as a vamp. “How’d you know my name?”
Lissa smiled, sweet as a summer breeze. “I know a lot about you. Maybe we could, you know, get a cup of coffee one day. Put Corry right here.” Lissa patted the seat and her own lap.
Berky looked as if he’d been poleaxed. But he was tender as a mama bear with a cub as he placed Corry on the back seat, her head and upper body in Lissa’s arms.
“This is where you say, ‘I’d love that, Lissa,’ ” KeeKee said.
“I’d love that, Lissa,” Berky repeated as I climbed into the passenger seat.
“My number’s on file with the club. Call me,” Lissa said.
“You white dudes are dumb as shit,” KeeKee said.
The doors closed. We moved silently into the night. Behind me I knew the cams had come back on. Baby brother would make sure.
EJ
He replayed the security system’s footage on his own dedicated unit. With the assistance ofOjos, our security AI, he cut out or damaged anything that would identify his sister, her friends, and everything that happened after Angie’sdisruptorat Kegsand Boots. When Angie and Walter were nearly home, and before the cops would demand to see the camera footage of the fight in the parking lot, EJ reinstalled the altered footage from the Kegs. He wired Berkley funds he considered adequate to keep the bouncer happy, sent him a short text that said,Tell the police it looks like a gang fight and some people got away.
The necessities done, EJ followed the progress of KeeKee’s vehicle until everyone was dropped off, including his sister. She stopped in the office downstairs, and EJ left his apartment, taking the elevator down to greet her.
When he got to the office, she was depositing something into her desk drawer, where she kept most of her business amulets. She unstrapped her unused vamp-killer from her thigh and hung it, in its sheath, on the desk leg.
