I said out loud, “There must be backups.”
“Of what?” Adrian asked through tight lips. Never taking his eyes off the road. Considering his path, and snapping the Malibu’s wheel around to take us a new way, closer and closer to the hotel. Christ Almighty, I probably could’ve run faster.
“Backups of the paper trail. Nobody …” My mind wandered briefly. I led it back. “Nobody just files things anymore. It’s all scanned and stored on disks. Or on someone’s computer, somewhere. Or a thumb drive,” I rambled on.
“Bruner probably has it.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “But I bet he doesn’t have all of it.” Then I said, right as we pulled around to the hotel’s valet parking, “I’m going to kill that motherfucker, and I’m going to enjoy it.”
We leaped out of the car, and Adrian tossed the keys to the nearest uniformed dude. As we started to run he said, “I thought I had dibs.”
“Fuck your dibs,” I said, and I bypassed the elevator altogether, heading instead for the stairs. If Adrian wanted to wait he was welcome to, but I was going to fly like an eagle without him.
The emergency exit door banged shut behind me and I didn’t hear Adrian follow; but then again, I wasn’t listening for him. I was concentrating on the stairs, two or three at a time, pumping for all I was worth and simultaneously wishing I had a beverage to refresh my strength … and forgetting I had one. It was just as well. There wasn’t time. There was only the unending staircase, crooking ever-upward.
I burst onto the floor where our suites were conjoined, and before I rounded the corner I knew something was wrong. Before I’d staggered, panting, upon the scene I could smell it—a wet mess of metal and plasma. Before I’d opened the door—and before I’d even seen that it’d been forced—I knew that something was horribly, horribly incorrect, and that nothing was going to be the same, ever again.
Sometimes I overreact.
This was not one of those times.
Without even thinking to draw my gun (just as well, since it was empty and back at the office), I shoved myself against the door and forced it inward, flapping with a crash against the closet door and shattering the mirror there.
My entrance startled two men who were busying themselves by going through Ian and Cal’s things. They jerked to attention at the sight of me, but they didn’t stay that way long. I flung myself at them, faster than they could’ve processed—and I broke one’s neck before he had time to lift the Taser he’d been holding in his free hand. I tasted the crackle of electricity and smelled the sizzling ozone as the thing deployed, even as he died. It fired straight into the wall and the two little prongs stuck, vibrating and shining, humming and harming nothing.
The second guy—Christ, both of them dressed like Trevor, only with a little more precision—had the presence of mind to duck out of my way and break for the door, but I caught him by the feet and brought him down like an antelope. I was so outraged by his mere existence that it was all I could do not to tear off his arms and beat him with them. I settled for stomping on his throat and taking his gun—a very nice Glock that reminded me of mine back home in Seattle.
This reminded me in turn of Domino and Pepper and the storehouse, and how I didn’t know if any of that was okay, due entirely to asswipes like the ones in that room, dead now, both of them, and me running from the room without knowing where to go next.
Cal hadn’t been there. Ian hadn’t been there.
But there’d been blood before I arrived. Plenty of blood. I didn’t know whose; I hadn’t even had the clarity of thought to notice if it was vampire or mortal blood, and I sure as hell didn’t have the cognitive felicity to consider it as I fled next door. Where else could I check but my own room? Where else might either of them have escaped to?
It didn’t make perfect sense and I knew it, but it was all I could think of so I burst inside, where the lock had also been forced. Brutally, I had to gather, since it fell away under my shoulder as easily as a doggy door.
The room had been trashed with prejudice. All available drawers had been ripped off their rails and emptied onto the floor; the bed had been unmade and the space beneath it violated. Slash marks defaced the cushions of the settee and the love seat, on the off chance I’d been hiding anything good inside them, I supposed.
I knew Adrian’s footsteps, even running. I’d learned the weight of him and the rhythm of his pace. He was coming up fast.
“Raylene!” he gasped, stopping when he saw me standing in the middle of the destroyed room.
I don’t know what kind of look I gave him, but it was enough to send him back out and around the corner. I heard him checking in at Ian and Cal’s room, seeing the carnage, making some assumptions, and exiting—shutting the door behind him, which was something I hadn’t thought to do.
By the time he’d rejoined me, I’d found Cal.
Cal was sprawled out on his face between my bed and the window, half covered by a curtain that had been brought down in what must have been a struggle. I could tell by the way his head was bent, and by the way his arms and legs were all uncomfortably akimbo, never mind the pool of blood that spread beneath him.
I could tell he was dead.
I crouched down beside him and moved his face so I could see it, but it told me nothing. There was no revelation waiting in his eyes, or a clue to what had happened clutched in his fist. He was just … gone. That was all.
“Cal?” Adrian asked. It sounded like a guess, and I thought it was a stupid thing to say except that he was still in the doorway, and could only see Cal’s feet.
So I said, “Yeah. It’s him.”
“Shit,” he said, but I hardly heard it for the sound of men tramping up the stairs, clicking their walkie-talkie buttons and organizing a response to whatever danger the building’s security had diagnosed. Or maybe they were more Trevors, party to whoever had done this.
Either way, Adrian was right when he took my arm and said, “We have to get out of here.”
“No,” I said reflexively. “We have to find Ian.”
“Ian isn’t here,” Adrian pointed out, so infuriatingly reasonable. “So we have to go somewhere else. This is about to get sticky. Come on,” he urged me again, being gentle, almost. But firm.
“Where would he go?” I asked, and I hated myself for how much it sounded like crying.
“We’ll figure it out on the way.”
“Do you think they took him?”
“No,” he said, I assume in order to humor me.
I settled for it. Hell, I clung to it. And I clung to Adrian’s hand as he shoved open the sliding balcony door and pushed me outside, shutting the thing behind us both and beginning the long, cold crawl down over the edge.
15
We were halfway down when I caught a whiff … but that’s the wrong word. Not a “whiff” exactly—it was more like a sweeping impression, some sense that I was going the wrong way and that I was required elsewhere. It was the impression of tugging, not as subtle as a psychic whisper, and not quite as hard as a punch in the gut.
I stopped, dangling by my hands perhaps half a dozen floors above the ground. When I stopped, Adrian stopped, too.
“What?” he asked in a quiet hiss.
I looked up and saw nothing but the underside of the balcony. In the distance I heard police cars and fire engines; someone with a walkie-talkie had made it out in one piece.
Someone had found Cal, I assumed. Someone was looking for us.
My companion was straining to hold himself in position, balancing on the edge of a rail that looked too thin to hold him. “Raylene?” he asked, more urgently this time.
I told him, “Up.”
“You can’t be fucking serious!”
I looked down and over to where he was perched—not ten feet away. I said, “Yeah, I think I am. I think Ian’s up there. I think he’s on the roof,” I added, even though I had virtually nothing to back up that hunch. Just that warm, strange pull that leaned against me an
d made me want to climb.
“What is it with your kind and rooftops?” he muttered, not really expecting an answer.
I gave him one anyway. “Rooftops are a way inside,” I said, pulling myself up now, instead of lowering myself down. “They’re someplace where people tend not to go, and once you’re up there, especially at night, it’s easy to hide. And sometimes, if you need a way out, it’s the last stop and only way to run.”
Up, lift, and over the balcony.
Half a floor down and … I looked up, craning my neck around. We’d started from the fifteenth. We’d descended maybe seven. I thought there were twenty floors in total, so maybe twelve floors to the top from where we were camped out.
Adrian was struggling, and I wasn’t so far away from exhaustion myself. I looked back at him, teetering on that rail, trying hard just to make it to the ground. He’d never be able to take himself up another however-many-floors.
I told him, “Go down without me.”
He said, “No.”
“Yeah, seriously. You won’t make it to the top, and I promise,” I said, turning around and getting a better grip, “I won’t think less of you as a man or anything.” I tried to give it a wink and a grin.
Say one thing for him, say he wasn’t crazy. The sweat was shining on his forehead, dripping down his temples, and his arms were shaking. “Okay.” He nodded. “Okay, you’re right.”
“Meet me back by Lincoln, in … I don’t know. Another hour or two. I’ll meet you over there, soon as I can.”
“Got it,” he told me, and he gave me a head-bob that said good-bye and I’ll see you there, or possibly just whatever. Regardless, he began to descend again, a little more jerkily than before, but I was pretty sure he’d be all right. It’d been a long night for everyone, and he needed a break worse than I did.
But not much worse.
I scrabbled, clawed, and heaved myself up another few floors until I thought I couldn’t go even another foot, and all the while that pulse, or that warning, or that summons … whatever it was … it was still drawing me along.
With a sigh and an upturned nose, I reached into my satchel and drew out that god-awful little pouch of blood.
I gave it a disdainful squish, noting that although it was cold, it didn’t appear to be chunky with ice—which believe you me is fucking disgusting. And it’s not like my body heat would warm it up or keep it nice and gooey. Best I can hope for (unless I want to tote a hot-water bottle around with me) is Not Frozen and Totally Preservative-Laden Dribble of Sustenance.
God. Half a pint. Barely enough to bother with, and if I hadn’t been so busted and worn out by the evening’s activities I wouldn’t have done it. I would’ve sucked up my pride, wandered down to skid row, and taken a nibble off a bum like a civilized woman.
But I didn’t have such a homeless meat-sack handy, so it was just me and my pouch of goo. I scrunched up my nose and bit down on a corner, puncturing it and spilling a bit down my chin. Ladylike, yes. Also ladylike was the way I guzzled it as if I were dying of thirst in the goddamn desert. It was revolting, but it was exactly what I needed, and my body demanded it with such a vicious insistence that I came close to sucking the plastic bag down, too. Then, I guess, I would’ve starved to death like one of those sea turtles that swallows a baggie, thinking it’s a jellyfish. Man. What a way to go.
I wadded up the empty baggie and tossed it off the balcony.
Thus somewhat invigorated, I resumed my climb. It wasn’t the shot in the arm I wanted, but it was enough to let me man-haul myself up and over the balconies, one after another, straight up into the sky—well beyond the point at which I would’ve collapsed and given up if I hadn’t had any refreshments.
Finally my fingertips crossed over the very tippy-top of the building’s edge. I grunted, heaved, crawled, and hauled until I’d slung one leg up over the side and could flop onto the tar-covered surface.
But even through my exhaustion, I had to look. I had to see.
The sky above was swirling, very faintly but very distinctly—pitching to and fro as if it were being stirred. All the clouds swished like they’d been flushed, doing that lazy, sliding spin. My head was spinning, too. My eyes were closing from the pressure of it … not just the crushing psychic fog but from pure weariness the likes of which I wasn’t sure I’d ever felt before.
I dragged myself to my knees, and then staggered up to my feet. It was dark there, darker than it should’ve been. I rubbed at my eyes in case that would clear them.
It didn’t.
Stepping forward, I immediately tripped and fell on my face—or rather, onto one cheek and one hand. The other hand got caught in the strap of my go-bag and the short version is, I tumbled over the obstacle with every bit as much dainty precision as I’d dropped myself onto the roof in the first place.
It was not an auspicious beginning.
As I pushed myself up I patted the obstacle. It was wearing wool pants and some kind of uniform. Something with a badge clipped onto a pocket. Didn’t matter. The obstacle was dead and posed no threat to yours truly, so I tried to ignore it and keep moving.
If only I could see … What was wrong with my eyes? What had happened to my superlative night vision and my winning stealth?
I could only see clearly when I looked at the sky, so I tipped my chin up and gazed at the immense funnel, hoping it could tell me something.
Hands out, I stumbled forward, feeling my way around.
I tripped again, dropped to my knees this time, and cried out because, hot damn, that hurt! The impact split my favorite black burgling pants and jammed my knees clear down to the bone.
My feeble whimper was answered by a shudder in the fog, something I couldn’t describe but could feel up and down my spine.
At this point, I figured I was screwed coming or going, so I hunkered beside what turned out to be yet another corpse and I whispered, because I couldn’t bring myself to shout. “Ian?” It came out in a squeak that hardly sounded like me at all. I wished I wasn’t so worn out; I wished I had fresh blood handy, and lots of it—but all the blood at my immediate disposal was cooling and pooling in the corpses, and corpses are notoriously bad bleeders. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but drinking from the already-dead requires a lot more patience and leisure time than I had right then.
The fog shuddered again and I shuddered with it.
“Ian, is that you? Are you up here?” I tried again.
The fog remained, but it thinned.
“Ian, I know you’re up here,” I lied. I only prayed he was up there. Because if this wasn’t his doing, I had no idea what I was dealing with and I was genuinely afraid. Hell, I was genuinely afraid regardless. I’d never seen anything like this before—from a vampire or any other immortal. “It’s me, Raylene.”
The story Ian had told me—his vague, reluctantly shared story about how he’d escaped Jordan Roe, and the weird power he’d somehow developed—was this what he’d meant?
Then I heard Ian’s voice, thick and wet. “They killed Cal.” He was somewhere in front of me, and to my left. I tried to scoot toward the sound of him, and kicked some dead bastard’s hand.
“Jesus,” I said, wondering how many people had followed him up there, and how many people he’d killed. What was he doing up here? Was this the result of some weird new sense, developed to make up for the lack of his eyesight, as he believed? It was a tantalizing thought; it made me wonder if I could develop it, too—or if any other vampire could, given the right set of circumstances. Not that I wanted to go blind in order to find out.
“I couldn’t save him,” he said.
I’d almost caught my breath. Almost found my footing. “I saw him, downstairs. There were two other guys hanging out in your room, but I took care of them.”
“Violently, I hope.” His voice was so cold it was brittle, and ready to snap.
I followed it, drawing myself through the shaded dark, hoping to reach him. Any minute. Any second. He was onl
y a few feet in front of me—he couldn’t be any farther than that. Any moment my fingers would graze his shoulder, or maybe his knee. From the sound of the echo, I thought he might be sitting down on something.
“Ian?” I said, hoping I sounded sweet, innocent, harmless, and interested. “What’s going on?”
“They shouldn’t have taken Cal. He had nothing to do with this—not any of it. He was only a helper, not a conspirator. But there was nothing I could do. They surprised us. And I don’t understand … there’s so much I don’t understand.”
“Maybe I can help.”
“They took everything,” he told me, as if I hadn’t said a thing. “They destroyed everything.”
“Ian, Adrian, and I made it to Major Bruner’s office. We found more paperwork—more files. Much more than what I was able to give you from Adrian’s stash.”
The black fog held its breath. “Is that true?”
“Of course it’s true! I’ve got it in my bag. Let’s get downstairs and get the hell out of here. I’ll read it to you, start to finish. We’ll find someplace calm to sort this out.”
Dream-like, he said, “We can’t go downstairs. We can never go back there. They’ll try to take us away.”
“Not downstairs in the room. Downstairs outside. We’re meeting up at the Lincoln Memorial—”
“When?”
“As soon as I can talk you down off this ledge,” I said, though it seemed like an appalling choice of words and it no doubt was. “Please, Ian. Come with me. Let’s get out of here. Let’s go, and we can sort everything out somewhere else.”
“I should’ve left when Cal wanted me to leave. He’d been begging, insisting. But I stayed, because you wanted me to. You convinced me to.” The swirling above became more aggressive—more like a hurricane than a mere storm front.
“That’s true.” I still held out my hands, hoping to find him.