“Don’t think it hasn’t occurred to me. But no, it ought to be enough to add a row of zeros to my bank account; that’s the goal here. Keep your eye on the prize, Ray.”
I shuddered to consider the sheer stores of wealth the greedy bastard must be hoarding like a dragon in a cave. “I’m glad I could be of service,” I told him. “How do you want to get these, anyway? I can’t remember what we decided.”
“If you drop those things into the mail, I will come to your house and kill you myself. Same goes for UPS or FedEx, I swear to God. You sit on them, and I’ll come get them. Or you can bring them out to me, whichever you like best—I don’t care.”
“Sit on them. Got it.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Of course I do. And I’ll keep them safe between now and such a time as you can get your sticky little paws on them, don’t worry.”
“Excellent. Where are you now?”
“Atlanta. It’s a long story. Don’t worry about it.”
“Ah!” he said happily. “That’s not too far at all. I can hop a flight tomorrow night, and pick them up from you then.”
“No.”
“Don’t tell me that,” he commanded.
“I’m here on business, Horace. Business of a different and personal nature. I won’t be around much, and I can’t promise you I’ll be available to nurture your every whim.”
“When you put it that way, it sounds unreasonable.”
“I’ll call you when I get back to Seattle, and we’ll work something out, okay?”
He hung up on me.
I shut the cell, then leaned back against the bed, suddenly so tired I could hardly see straight.
You think vampires don’t get jet lag? Think again. Just because the sun shuts us down doesn’t mean that the shifting time zones don’t screw with us big time. I’m not always ready to sleep when the sun comes up, particularly if I’ve been in the northern latitudes and I’m on a steady schedule. And then, naturally enough, I don’t always want to wake up as soon as the sun sets.
Not that it matters. When half your day is potentially fatal, you have to make hay while the sun shines. Or the opposite of that.
Adrian came back within half an hour. By then, I’d had a shower and dried my hair, and was mostly dressed. Usually it doesn’t take me even that long, but this was different. I was visiting the Barringtons, on behalf of a big important House, and I wanted to look more presentable than usual.
By which I don’t mean that I wander around looking like road-kill. In my opinion, I usually look awesome. Effortlessly so, if I do say so myself.
Yet somehow I felt confounded by the prospect of the Atlanta House. I’d heard a hundred years of stories about the place—how crazy it was, how dangerous it could be, and how easy it was to commit a grievous faux pas without realizing it.
Southern hospitality my ass.
Perhaps it isn’t fair for me to put it like that, because by all reports, the Barringtons aren’t local by origin. They’re carpetbaggers from Philadelphia—an offshoot of a House that had grown too big to govern. Or more to the point, it’d grown too big for everyone to successfully get along without a whole lot of murdering going on.
It happens like that, sometimes. A House gets so huge that it can’t sustain itself in peace, so a few of the more difficult family members are kicked out to start their own party. Or to take over someone else’s.
A hundred years ago, Atlanta was mostly rebuilt from Sherman’s firebug drive-by, but the vampire population hadn’t returned in force. Any serious diaspora is hard on the undead, since the patterns required for our survival can require weeks or months to establish with any real security. It took me years to carve out my little safe zone in Seattle, with all my attendant identities, bank accounts, and property holdings. I don’t know if it was harder or easier to get a setup established back before computers and telephones and security cameras, but it couldn’t have been easy to return and rebuild after a fire of that magnitude. Whoever had held the House before the war could hardly be blamed for abandoning the place in its wake.
Any survivors had surely started new communities elsewhere, or joined others. Organizing a move home was probably more trouble than it was worth.
Enter the Barringtons.
They came, they saw, they conquered the chaos with yet more chaos, and they were demented enough that no one ever challenged them on it. Their reputation was one of capriciousness and cunning, ruthlessness and violence.
But no one ever accused them of being dumb.
“You nervous?” Adrian asked me. He may as well have asked if I’d been to the beach lately.
“Yeah. Are you?”
“Yeah.”
I settled on black. Head-to-toe. It’s classic, it all matches, and it’s a power color. Seneschals used to wear white, back in ye olden days, but these weren’t those days and I didn’t have a stitch of white to my name anyway, with the possible exception of a crisp dress shirt or two.
“Dramatic,” Adrian observed. He was dressed like a dude. Dark jeans, gray sweater, and black motorcycle boots. Dudes always have it easy when it comes to wardrobe. So do ghouls, I guess—unless there was some dress code of which I was unaware. With the Barringtons, one never knew.
“Well,” I said when I was done.
“Well,” he said back.
“Let’s do this.”
He jingled the keys at me. Together we headed downstairs for the parking garage. The valet nabbed the car, and Adrian drove. Ghouls chauffeur.
I didn’t ride in the back, though. It would’ve felt too weird, so I sat beside him in the passenger’s seat, breathing deeply and steadily, like I was in labor. Anything to soothe my nerves, because my nerves were rubbing off on Adrian, and if both of us were nervous, we’d never get anywhere.
I closed my eyes as we headed out toward the Buckhead neighborhood.
In my brain, I replayed the voice-mail message to which I’d awakened, informing me that Elizabeth had arrived safely and was settling into her new accommodations. Ian and Domino had helped her into the floor immediately below our living quarters, since it was mostly finished and we were out of bedrooms in the main area. It was for the best. It’d give her some privacy, and it’d give them a buffer between our safe space and her episodes, should she have any before I got back.
She was already asking about the bones, wanting to know when she’d get the ones I’d promised she could keep. I tried not to fixate on that. I tried not to wonder if this had been a bad call, and if I shouldn’t have maybe put my foot down before Adrian had started buying plane tickets.
Oh wait. He did that while I was asleep.
Well, I was the idiot who’d agreed to it upon awakening. But if there was a piper to be paid, he’d have to take an IOU because one bad thing at a time. Just one. And Atlanta was pretty damn bad.
“Everything will be fine, you know,” I said out loud.
Adrian glanced at me. The streetlights cut bars of white and gold across his face as we drove, and he mustered a smile. “I’m sure you’re right.”
“The thing is, we have to stay cool.”
“I am all about staying cool.”
“Just remember that we have a right to be there, and we don’t even have any lies to remember—except that you’re a ghoul. Beyond that, this is on the up-and-up.”
“And except for how I’m going to look for Isabelle, or some trace of her. And you’re trying to prove that they’re horrible, deranged murderers.”
“And except for those things, yes. But there’s nothing on the books to keep you from asking around while you’re there—and no law or rule against it. As long as you remain discreet, and don’t get yourself into any trouble while we’re guests of their House—”
“I know, I know. And don’t worry. I won’t get myself killed.”
“It’s hard not to worry. If you do anything to get yourself killed, they’ll be after me right behind you.”
“It warms my
heart to hear you express such concern for my well-being.”
“Nothing but love for ya, baby. And in all seriousness, maybe that’s the best way to think of it. We’re guests in their House, and that gives us both rights and obligations. Be a good guest, and we’ll be all right.”
“Stop worrying,” he ordered me.
“I can’t. It’s what I do.”
By the time we pulled up to the new-money mansion that served as Barrington headquarters, I was vibrating with tension.
“This is the place?” he asked dubiously.
The engine idled. We were sitting at a gate with a call box.
“This is the place,” I confirmed, my voice both drier and weaker than I would’ve liked.
And what a place it was. A McMansion in the most ridiculous sense, in a neighborhood full of them. Buckhead is the place where all the football and basketball players have their residences, and although some of the homes are older, most of them are circa 1990 or later, with all the design sense and charm of post-modern architecture, if one may be permitted to use a term loosely.
The Barrington mansion sprawled on a lawn perhaps two acres big, and surrounded by a stone fence that was maybe ten feet high, by my best guess. I could’ve predicted broken glass cemented into the top, since it’s less conspicuous than barbed wire and more difficult to simply clip one’s way past. Though it was nighttime, obviously, I could pick out that the mansion was painted the eggshell beige with white trim that seems to be the industry standard for such homes. It would probably be uncharitable to call the look “neoclassical Georgian plus IBM taupe and gingerbread revival meeting in a dark alley for fisticuffs and insults.” But there I go anyway.
It wasn’t my kind of joint. I shall leave it at that.
Suddenly I was glad we had a Lexus. If I’d showed up in one of my throwaway beaters, I would’ve felt ridiculous. Never mind that I can afford to buy something much nicer; that’s not the point. Inconspicuousness is the point, though I could assume it would be lost on the Barringtons.
But I had to admit, they fit in with the rest of the block.
Therefore, it may be that inconspicuousness is in the eye of the beholder … or in the zoning laws, as the case may be.
Adrian rolled down the window and leaned out to press the red call button. I tried to shake the idea that it was summoning dogs, or activating a trapdoor that would swallow us and the Lexus whole, but that was easier said than done. The place was a brick-and-mortar caricature of Mr. Burns’s mansion from The Simpsons.
A tinny voice came through the call box. “How can I help you?”
Adrian cleared his throat and said, “I have Raylene Pendle, seneschal from the San Francisco House. We’re expected.”
The box didn’t answer right away. When it did, the voice said, “Yes, please come inside. Follow the driveway up to the house, and then around back. You’ll find a small lot where you can park.”
Then the gates buzzed, but they didn’t swing slowly open like I’d expected. They retracted to the left and right of the entrance, coming to a stop behind the wall.
The smell of electricity wafted in through Adrian’s open window, and it wasn’t just the call box. Up on the stone walls, I could see cameras tracking our every move, and there were no doubt cameras I couldn’t see lurking in other spots. Either birds or bats flapped up and into the night as the gates rolled back into position.
My money was on bats. Little blingy ones, carrying tiny Louis Vuitton clutches.
Slowly Adrian drove us up the long, gently curving driveway that led up to the house and then around it. Much to my personal amusement, the path was lined with solar-powered lawn lights—one every few yards, on both sides. That had to count as irony in some universe, right?
Behind the house, the place was blessedly well lit from a vampiric standpoint. Lights were installed behind bushes and from overhangs, all of them diffuse enough to give the yard a glow without blinding anyone who pulled up to park. I could tell someone had put a lot of thought into it.
Like I said, crazy—not dumb.
The Lexus stopped in a logical place, alongside a BMW and another fucking Hummer, both of them so highly polished and meticulously detailed that they gleamed like ghosts. Adrian cut the engine and turned in the seat to face me.
“We can do this. And it will be fine.”
“What you said.”
He brandished the knuckles of his right hand, calling for a fist-bump. I gave him one and said, “Let’s go, ghoul.” And I prayed that he remembered Rule Number One above all.
Rule Number One: We aren’t friends.
And this sucked a lot, because I wanted nothing more than to approach this house with a really good friend to back me up. Even though I had one, the employer–employee façade was going to take the edge off my fragile feelings of security. But that’s the nature of the beast.
We exited the Lexus and closed our doors in sync, smacking the evening silence with one loud bang that made us both jump, even though we were the ones making the noise. But we pulled ourselves together, tossed each other the nod of a cohort, and made for the big back porch—where a large set of double doors with glass panes were illuminated by a helpful, handy-dandy spotlight … in case visitors had any questions about where they were expected to go.
“Me first,” I whispered without moving my lips. “Don’t forget.”
“I’m not,” he replied in kind.
Up the prettily cherry-stained deck steps I went, with him close behind, and before I could reach the doors to knock or search for a doorbell, a dark silhouette appeared on the other side of the glass. It was not a large shadow. It implied someone approximately my own size and shape. The lights from the house’s interior backlit this woman so that her features were all but indistinguishable until her hand was on the latch to let us inside.
The swaying open of that door on its hinges was no creaking of a cemetery gate, but it felt no less sinister for the smooth arc that opened the home.
Her hand remaining on the latch, the woman said, “Welcome to the Barrington House, Ms. Pendle. I am Sheriden.”
Sheriden was a pixie-faced frosted blonde in her thirties, wearing simple clothes but a diamond that could’ve choked a Doberman. I suppose marking one’s ghouls with tattoos is seen as tacky these days. Jewelry certainly has more holding power. I hear you can get rid of a tattoo, but it’d be tough to part with a rock like that.
“Hello, Sheriden.” I nodded politely. The one-name introduction and her obvious mortality told me she was probably the head ghoul of the household. So far as slaves went, it was a pretty good gig. Rather like being a high-end butler, but with more bodily fluids involved—unless being a butler is much weirder than it looks on Masterpiece Theatre. “I thank you for your welcome. I’ve brought an assistant, as you can see. This is Adrian, and he answers to me.”
“Excellent. Won’t you both come inside? The family has assembled to meet you in the main living area downstairs.”
Awesome, I thought. What I said was, “Certainly.”
Adrian didn’t say a word because no one had spoken to him. So far, so good.
Sheriden stood aside as we stepped into what looked like a rear parlor or some other kind of sitting room, and off to our right was a dining area. I mean, a regular people’s dining area. Vampires don’t need a hardwood table and seating for eight, but I suppose it’s nice to preserve the illusion.
Something unpleasant about this niggled around in the back of my head, and as Sheriden closed the door behind us, shutting us inside the Barrington compound proper, I remembered something.
Southerners don’t typically receive people at the back door.
And when they do, it’s considered an insult.
12
As we followed the narrow, retreating back of Sheriden the ghoul, I made a hearty effort to observe and memorize absolutely everything. The first observation had to do with their security system: It was extensive, and part of it was new. Very new. It
still had the smell of wires unused to warming, and in the corners I heard the digital clicks of unworn lenses shifting to watch us. At the windows I spied the telltale signals of electrical monitors, no doubt routed through some call center in which the Barringtons had the sort of friends who understood discretion in a vampire emergency; and just over the threshold, as the door had shut behind us, I’d felt the almost imperceptible give and shift of a pressure plate. Disabled, I assume. Or else, if I were feeling particularly paranoid (and I was), I’d guess that it was gathering vitals about us newcomers—our weight, maybe height or some other indicator that would set us apart from the regular family members.
I try to keep up on the newest security technology but it moves fast, and there are always private enterprises making exciting new prototypes … the likes of which a wealthy family might pick up on a lark.
This mix of the usual stuff and exciting add-ons told me that they’d recently made some major and expensive upgrades. What had previously been satisfactory had failed them, or else some new threat looked meaty enough to warrant the trouble.
I was willing to bet it had something to do with William Renner’s untimely demise … or possibly Isabelle, if she was still hanging around making trouble. If she was anything like her brother, I wouldn’t put it past her.
Deeper into the house we went, passing by the indoor entrance to the garage. It was wide open, and someone was inside, doing something noisy to a vintage Bentley. Two other cars were parked in there—one red and shiny, one black and shiny. We buzzed past too quickly for me to pin down makes or models.
The home’s interior was posh and leaning in the direction of a televangelist’s favorite set, but again, this might be an attempt to fit in with the neighbors. The carpet was pale, silvery, and plush enough to eat my pointy black boots; the hall mirrors were surrounded with baroque gilt and the occasional sconce. The walls were done in decorator colors—muted wines, grays, and golds. It hinted at someone somewhere with taste—but whoever this someone was, he or she was given too limited a rein to make a dent in the overall Dolly Parton feng shui.