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“It’s fine. No big deal,” I muttered, letting go of her and entering in first. I really didn’t want to rehash it with her. I shouldn’t have even brought it up anyway.
“What are you working on with the mad doctor?” she asked, clearly trying to change the subject for me.
“Dr. Lovell isn’t mad. He’s just eccentric,” I replied. “And if you must know, today I’m going to be in charge of cleaning and retouching damage on the face of a mid-nineteenth-century portrait.”
“The Healy pieces.”
I nodded. “I’ve been working on a series of them. It shouldn’t take that long till I’m finished. I really want to focus on restoring something more…profound. Not that I mind the Realism of Healy. But—”
“It’s not dramatic enough or old enough for you. I don’t know why you like the Renaissance so much. But don’t rush, or you might end up like this,” she said, showing the photo of what could not be a restoration.
My mouth dropped in horror. “Oh, no!”
“Yes, you are looking at a fifteenth-century fresco of Christ of Jesus.”
“No. No. No. No. It looks like a kindergarten drawing. What happened?” I gasped and took the phone from her hand, feeling my heart ache. “Who? How? Can they sue? Why did you show this to me? Now, I’m so upset!”
I zoomed into the picture as we came off the elevator and walked out of the building. This was a crime against art. I couldn’t believe it. Had they chosen any random old lady to fix this? It wasn’t even fixed. She just painted over it.
“There is no saving it. I don’t even know where to start. It’s all wrong. From the beginning to the end—” I stopped talking and glanced up from the phone, looking at the street to find the sets of eyes that I was now sure were on me. It sent shivers of gloom and danger down my spine, nothing at all like my stalker.
“Druella,” Simone whispered, taking a step back to stand beside me. She felt it, too. And it didn’t take long until we saw them…three vampires, one across the street from us, a teenager dressed in ripped jeans with headphones on her head. Another was to our right, a tall, middle-aged man, stepping out of the mail truck and whistling to himself. The last one was on the left, sitting at the corner coffee shop, talking to the waitress. Simone’s hands instantly began to spark, and I grabbed her wrist quickly.
“The humans,” I muttered under my breath, reminding her we were in the middle of the city where people were walking right past us, and it was broad daylight.
“They are breaking the treaty,” Simone sneered back at me.
“What do you think we should do? Fight it out in the middle of H Street? They are Nobles. We can’t do it quietly.”
“What do they want?” she asked me, her eyes darting back and forth between all of them. The only one that held our gaze was the teenage-looking one across the street. She just stared openly and directly, menacingly.
This wasn’t good. I didn’t know what they wanted or how they had found us. But I knew these weren’t like the American vampires, the ones President Swan had come to control. We’d worked hard to draw the line. We only had to defend the outskirts of our lands. This was different. This was right in the center of Washington, DC. Our home.
“They are trying to provoke us.”
“It’s working,” Simone sneered. “We need to call the others.”
“What do you all want?” I asked as I stepped forward, knowing they could hear me.
The vampire across from us opened her mouth but then paused, her eyes shifting to the right. Then, like a gust of wind, a flash of light, they were gone. The vampire mailman had dropped his mail right on the corner. The woman from the coffee shop left with no evidence that she had been there except for the coffee cup and a confused waitress.
“What in the hell?” Simone snapped, turning in circles as she tried to look for them. “What happened? Where did they go?”
“I don’t know.” I really didn’t until I saw the gray eyes that met mine from the corner of the street. It was him, my stalker. Did they leave because of him?
Did he send them?
Who is he?
“Druella, we need to tell Axel and the others,” Simone said, already moving to the driver’s side of her car. “Druella!”
“Coming,” I said as I opened the passenger side and took a seat. But I couldn’t help staring out the window. He was still here, waiting, watching.
“What is it—”
“Tate, I’m with Druella. We just encountered three Noble vampires in the city.” Simone spoke frantically into the phone as she drove.
“What? In the city? Are you guys okay?” Tate asked.
