Page 121 of Flames and Blood

“Agreed.”

“And then there’s the second half. A favor. I don’t name it now. I collect it when I need it, and you don’t get to tell me it’s a bad time.” He says all of it flat. He’s said it many times before. “That’s my price for good information. Cheap information is cash only. This isn’t cheap information.”

I sit in a cold truck with my hand on the wheel and think about it for about a second.

“Agreed.”

“Say it properly, please.”

“I owe you a favor. Unnamed. Whenever you call it in.”

“There.” Nothing in his voice changes. “It’s said, so it’s done, and I’ll thank you not to make me remind you.” He gives me a name and a town and a street, and makes me repeat all three. “She doesn’t like visitors, and she doesn’t have a number to call. She’ll hang up on a stranger, and she’ll shut the door on one, so don’t waste your one knock.”

“Understood.”

“One more thing, and this one’s free.” Now there’s something in it, and it’s curiosity. “I heard what you did to Ilmar Vex. Everybody east of here has heard some version of it by now. A Turned man ending a Vex in a bedroom. That gets a man noticed by people he’d rather not be noticed by.”

“I’ve been noticed before.”

“Not like this.” Same flat tone. “Watch the road behind you. I mean it as a courtesy. I don’t threaten men who’ve already paid me.”

He hangs up first.

The town he gave me is a night and a half west. I spend the day between in a motel with the curtains taped shut and a chair against the door, and I get four hours of the kind of sleep that doesn’t help.

I get there on the second night. One main street, a church with a crooked steeple. My battered map takes me to the address Farrow gave me. A blue house sits back from the road with a gravel drive and no mailbox.

I knock once. The woman who opens the door is somewhere past sixty, gray hair cut short and practical, reading glasses pushed up into it. She looks at me the way a doctor looks at a chart.

“You’re not from around here,” she says.

“No.”

“And you’re not human.”

“No.”

“Well.” She steps back and holds the door. “Come in, then. I’ve had worse than a vampire with manners knock on this door. At least you’re not selling anything.”

“I might be, by the end of this.”

“Everyone is, eventually.”

The front room is ordinary. A couch, a lamp, a shelf of paperbacks. Under the coffee smell there’s something clinical, close to rubbing alcohol. She sits down across from me and doesn’t offer coffee and doesn’t apologize for it.

“You’re Crowe,” she says when I don’t speak. “Farrow said you’d come. I’m Branna.”

“And you opened the door.”

“If Farrow vouches for you, it’s worth finding out what your business is.” She settles back, ankles crossed, in no hurry. “And I suspect it’s connected to mine.”

“It is.” I nod. “Is that a problem?”

“A man who’ll do Farrow a favor is not someone I need to be worried about.”

“I’m glad. I wouldn’t want you to be worried.” It’s a different kind of interrogation than I’m used to, but I get the sense that this is someone who wouldn’t respond well to pressure.

“I do a kind of work,” she says. “I don’t ask why anybody wants it done, and I don’t ask what happens after. That’s the arrangement. It’s kept me in business thirty years and out of trouble the whole time.”