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The ride didn’t take long, and the stretches of empty road in the barren night reminded me of how isolated the desert was. Why so many vampires would choose to settle in a place with so much sun and heat never made much sense to me, but then again, no one asked for my opinion.
The car pulled past large iron gates, and the house before us didn’t fit the area at all. Instead of a Spanish style—all flat stucco walls and clay roofs—this house was an old Victorian mansion with peaked roofs and oval windows near the top. A large porch sat at the front, the wood aged as though the place had been there for centuries.
Maybe it had. Who knew the truth when it came to immortals?
Kase opened my door, and I ignored the way the pebbles of the driveway dug into the bottom of my fuzzy slippers. My absurd outfit might have bothered me, but there was a benefit to looking weak and ridiculous.
It was easy to play the part of a medium when I had to, to pretend my abilities were on par with fortune tellers at fairs and the stay-at-home-moms who sold love potions along with MLM leggings. Safer, too, sincethosepeople were never seen as a threat. What I was, I didn’t know, but I didn’t need anyone else taking an interest in it—or me.
Inside the house, a young man offered to take my robe as though it were a jacket.
Keeping covered seemed a good idea, so I waved him off. No reason to walk into a room full of blood drinkers looking like a buffet.
I followed Kase not up the staircase but down. Beneath the first level, the already impressive mansion spread out into more rooms and areas than I could count.
It made sense, though. Being underground helped them conduct business even when the sun was up and reduced the chance of attack or danger. It had to suck to know only a curtain stood between someone and a fiery end.
Inside the final set of doors—two large ones that reached from floor to ceiling and were adorned with gold and jewels —was a place that made me rethink the entire thing.
Vampires stood on either side of a center aisle, the floor shiny black stone except for a middle strip of red tile. At the end of the walkway were several seats on two different levels of stage, most on the lower level, and on the upper level, just one.
Dense shadows twisted around the throne, as though a layer of living darkness surrounded the chair. I sensedsomethingfrom those shadows, but I couldn’t tell what they were. If they had ever been spirits, it had been so long ago that they were nothing but glimmers of what they had been.
And on the throne? A vampire who made my skin crawl and all my warnings go off like an old car the owner hoped would keep limping forward. He had long, straight black hair and dark skin. Flat and empty red-rimmed eyes met mine.
The older a vampire got, the less human they appeared and acted. It was as though they stopped remembering how to be human. All that showed in the absolute stillness of the one in the throne, the way he didn’t even blink.
“Ms. Harlin?”
I gulped and nodded. The whole idea of not showing fear before predators sounded like great advice until facing off against one.
“Thank you for coming. I wish to hire you.”
Well…that wasn’t what I expected…
I tried to play dumb, to pretend we were talking about my boring day job selling life insurance. “I’m afraid I don’t do policies for the undead since you don’t really…die.”
Colter tilted his head, as though unused to having to tell anyone something twice. Then again, as ruler of a coven, he probably never did. “I require yourotherset of skills.”
Well fuck.I supposed that answered if they knew about me, didn’t it? I’d thought I’d kept that side of me under wraps, but clearly, I hadn’t done a good enough job.
“What did you need?”
“I need you to speak to the spirit of someone recently deceased.”
Not a difficult task, nor an unusual one for those who knew my powers. Though… “I can’t talk to vampires who have died.” I frowned. “I mean, dead-dead. Like, deader than you are.”
And that was not the best example of self-preservation I’d ever heard.
Still, if Colter was offended, he didn’t show it. “No. Not a vampire.”Good. The last thing I needed was to explain how vampires didn’t have souls anymore, thus couldn’t be summoned. That was the sort of thing they might take offense to, and offending things that could kill me was dumb. For beings with such hard skin, I’d found vampires to be exceptionally sensitive. “I need you to speak with the most recent person a vampire killed.”
Less good.
I shuffled my fluffy slippers along the tile to buy time. Turning down the leader of a vampire coven was a good way to waste all that staying alive I’d done, but getting involved with the mess of a vampire who had been killing people—and the whole ‘most recent person he killed’ was a very bad way to put it—wasn’t a great idea either.
“Murder victims are notoriously difficult to summon—” I started, trying for my best ‘oh, I wish I could, really’ tone.
Colter’s eyes flashed red, the rim expanding until the entire iris turned ruby and bright. “You will do as I ask, and I will pay you well for your time. If you refuse, you will be lucky if a medium can find what is left ofyoursoul when we finish with you. Now, let us try this again. I have a job for you.”
My gulp was harsh against my bone-dry throat, but really, there was only one answer.
I plastered on a smile I didn’t feel and stuck my hands into the pockets of my penis robe. “Sounds great. Just give me a shovel and point me in the direction of the corpse.”
I wish fewer of my nights led to graverobbing.
