Biting Bad: A Chicagoland Vampires Novel (26 page)

“In that case,” Jonah said, clapping his hands together, “I think we’re ready.”

—

It made sense for us to drive separately; Jonah would be bunking in the House’s new digs for the evening, while I’d head back home and again into the Master’s suite.

Moneypenny still sat in the garage, dots of salt and grime on her exterior, but no less beautiful for it.

I’d just opened the door and put my sword into the passenger seat when the basement door opened behind me. Ethan walked inside, his gaze on the car.

“She needs cleaning,” he said.

“Probably, although she’s not going to get any cleaner tonight.” It was useless washing a car in Chicago in the winter until the snow was gone and the forecast was clear.

Ethan made a vague sound. “You’ll be careful.”

“Always. And Jonah’s no slouch.”

“I know,” he said. “And the irony of his spending the evening with you on Valentine’s Day isn’t lost on me.”

“I didn’t think it would be,” I said with a wink. “You’re very smart, for a vampire.”

“You’re very mouthy for a Novitiate.”

“
Your
Novitiate,” I said.

Ethan opened the door for me and gestured inside. “Go take care of Grey House, Sentinel.”

I nodded. “Maybe, if you’re very good, I’ll bring back dinner.”

Ethan smiled wickedly and pressed a hard kiss to my lips. “I’m rarely good, Merit. But I’m often spectacular.”

He winked and shut the door, and disappeared back into the House.

It took a moment before I had the mental faculties to drive the car.

—

The housing might have been arranged on short notice, but the new temporary digs of the Grey House vampires were pretty nice.

They were in a building named the King George, and the décor involved lots of inlaid “G”s in the marble floors and gilded mirrors that lined the first-floor lobby.

I waited there a few minutes for Jonah, checking out the giant urns of tropical plants and the very expensive artwork. Whatever their other troubles, Grey House must have solid finances in order to afford a place this nice.

Jonah finally walked in, the breeze blowing his hair around like a model at a photo shoot, two paper cups in hand. He nodded at the security guard at the desk, then handed a cup to me.

“Martin,” he said, gesturing toward the guard. “Rogue vampire.”

I waved to Martin with my cup. “I guess he’s on the night shift.”

“Har-har,” Jonah said, leading me to the bank of brass elevators. “Twentieth floor.”

I sipped my drink, spicy hot chai, until the elevators dinged and we stepped inside. Even the elevator cars were fancy, with small televisions on each side above the buttons. One showed a news channel, the other commercials about Chicago and its nightlife. I guess the King George was selling not just condos, but a way of life.

“Did I mention this place was fancy?” I asked Jonah, as we waited for the car to complete its rise.

“It’s what was available,” Jonah said. “And unfortunately, we’re paying for that fancy.”

The doors opened, revealing a long hallway with thick, decadent carpet. A scroll “G” was centered in front of the elevator area, and flowers sat on a pedestal table nearby.

“The ‘G’ thing is fortuitous.”

“Yeah, dumb luck there,” Jonah said. I followed him down the hallway to the right, until he stopped in front of number 2005.

He fished a set of keys from his pocket, picked through them until he found the right one, and stuck it into the lock.

“And away we go,” he said, loosing the lock and opening the door.

“Holy crap,” I muttered, stepping past him into the condo. The condo was completely empty, but it was still pretty lush. Like the lobby, the floors were marble. The walls were painted in a pale, creamy yellow, with white wooden trim. There was a kitchen on one side of the giant living area, with marble countertops and dark wood cabinets. The opposite wall was lined with floor-to-ceiling windows.

“This place is gorgeous,” I said, staring up at the coffered ceiling, which was painted three different tones of the same yellow color. “Very high end. Is this Scott’s condo?”

Jonah chuckled. “Nope. This one’s mine.”

“Yours?” This place put my little Cadogan House dorm room to shame. “All this for one vampire?”

“You’ve seen my digs at Grey House,” he reminded me. “Senior staff members get good rooms. That’s part of the advantage of making your own House, instead of squeezing into an old building like Cadogan House.” He gestured at the space. “You make your own home.”

“I guess. Anyway, it’s gorgeous. You could do some serious entertaining here. Hey, speaking of which, how was your date the other night?”

Jonah grimaced. “Not great.”

“No chemistry?”

“No show,” he said. “She stood me up.”

“No way.”

“Way. Haven’t even gotten so much as a phone call since.”

That couldn’t have been good for the ego. I’d never been stood up, mostly because I’d rarely dated as a human. I supposed that wasn’t much of a victory.

“That really sucks,” I offered. “Sorry to hear it.”

Jonah shrugged again. “It is what it is, you know.”

“I do.” I took one last gratifying look around the apartment, then gestured toward the door. “We should probably get ready.”

Jonah nodded. “We should. Your earbud in?”

I popped it into place. “It is now. Can you hear me?”

“Yes, because we’re standing in the same room.”

“You’re hilarious. Hey, I meant to ask: Did you recruit RG members to keep an eye out tonight?”

“I did. Four of them will be outside, but all in vehicles. Seemed safer that way. They stay warm, and no one gets suspicious if vampires are standing around outside, waiting for something to happen.”

I nodded. “How would you like to work this?”

He pulled out his phone and pulled up an image of the grounds. The apartment building was a rectangle right in the middle.

“Two sets of doors,” he said. “Front and back of the building. We’ve rented vans, and we’ll be dropping off the vampires in the front. Furniture deliveries are coming through the back. We’ve got an RG car on each entrance.”

He pointed to the front of the building. “Take point here. Keep an eye on cars passing by, the vampires coming in and out. Anything seems suspicious, don’t hesitate to contact me. We’ll stop at dawn, secure the building, start again at dusk if we don’t finish.” He glanced at me. “You good?”

“I’m good.” I patted my scabbard. “I feel better when she’s with me.”

“I feel better when you’re with me,” Jonah said. “You’ve got a good head on your shoulders. Let’s keep it that way, shall we?”

“I certainly intend to do so.”

A LITTLE B AND E BETWEEN FRIENDS

T
he move went smoothly. So smoothly, in fact, that I was already making plans to return to the House. Rioters might have ruined Valentine’s Day, but I wasn’t completely giving up on the possibility of dinner with Ethan. I could get Tuscan Terrace to go, and I hadn’t yet met a man who could resist the siren call of their penne with vodka sauce.

The vans moved like coordinated dancers. One van dropped vampires off at the apartment building about every twenty minutes, while the other made the trip back to Hyde Park.

Grey House vampires weren’t wilting lilies—they were mostly big, strapping guys—but they knew when to move. Like military recruits, they hopped off the van, duffel bags in hand, and jogged in line into the building, where Jonah sent them to their respective condos.

I saw non–Grey House vampires only twice. A member of the Red Guard—a cute girl in a Midnight High School T-shirt, the RG uniform—stepped out of the car and waved at me when I positioned myself outside the building.

I also saw a dog walker, a man with the largest Great Dane I’d ever seen. The dog pawed through the snow fearlessly and with obvious joy as his owner, muffled from toes to head, was dragged along behind him.

“This is the last one,” Jonah said, a couple of hours and one chai later. “Last van approaching you now.”

I put my hand on my sword, feeling a sense of inevitability strike. If drama was going to happen, it was going to happen now.

But the handoff came and went without so much as a stutter. The Novitiates disappeared inside, and the van driver handed me a receipt and took off into the night, no doubt seeking a warm bed. Jonah emerged from the lobby, looking tired but relieved.

I handed him the receipt. “I will not be paying this. But you can pay me for my services, if you’d like.”

“I owe you a steak.”

“That works.” I chuckled and stuffed my hands back into my pockets, when a low moan echoed from the street.

I froze, squinting into the darkness.

Jonah must have picked up on it. “Merit?”

“Did you hear that?”

Jonah paused, silent. “I don’t hear anything.”

I heard it again, then spied a low, dark figure moving up the sidewalk. I didn’t stop to explain, but I took off at a run down the sidewalk, my hand flipping open the thumb guard on my katana.

And then I reached her.

She was a vampire. A woman, blond and pale, wearing lounge clothes that had seen better days. And she was thin, brutally so. She didn’t look sick; she just looked like she hadn’t eaten in days.

“Good God,” I muttered, hitting the ground beside her. “Are you all right?”

She moaned, and it was a pitiful sound.

I looked back at Jonah, who had nearly reached us. “Jonah! Help me.”

“What the hell—,” he began, then fell to his his knees as well. “Brooklyn? Brooklyn? Are you all right?”

I looked up at Jonah in surprise. “You
know
her?”

He looked up at me, completely bewildered and plenty afraid. “She’s the girl I had a date with. Was supposed to have a date with, anyway. What the hell happened?”

“I don’t know. But she looks like she hasn’t had blood in a really long time.”

I immediately thought back to the room where Michael Donovan, McKetrick’s minion, had locked up the vampires he intended to kill. Michael was dead, but McKetrick was alive and well. Had he done this? Had this woman escaped death by his hands?

“We need to get her inside, and we need a doctor. Do you have someone on staff?”

“We do,” he said, and then lifted Brooklyn into his arms as if she weighed nothing at all.

I ran down the sidewalk and opened the door, and he hustled her inside and onto a couch in the lobby, as the few remaining Grey House vamps who lingered there looked on.

Jonah looked at the guard. “Can you call Dr. Gianakous? He just went upstairs?”

The guard nodded and picked up the receiver.

Brooklyn looked even worse in the light than she had outside. Her pale skin stretched thin across bone and muscle; her eyes were shadowed and sunken.

“I saw her a week ago,” he said, looking up at me. “That’s when we met—had coffee. She was absolutely fine. Utterly healthy. Curvy, even.”

“She couldn’t lose that much weight that quickly.”

Jonah shook his head. “Something else happened. Maybe that’s why she didn’t call me. She couldn’t.”

The elevator door dinged, and an attractive man with a head of thick dark hair rushed toward us.

“What happened?” he asked, instantly reaching for Brooklyn’s wrist and checking her pulse.

“She walked up and collapsed on the sidewalk outside. We don’t know why.”

Dr. Gianakous leaned down over Brooklyn’s head, presumably to listen to her breathing, then sat up again and checked her eyes with a small flashlight.

“What’s her name?” he asked.

“Brooklyn,” Jonah said.

“Brooklyn,” Dr. Gianakous said, snapping his fingers in front of her. “Brooklyn, do you know where you are?”

“Jonah?” she weakly said.

“I’m here,” Jonah said, grabbing her hand. “I’m here.”

There was a sweetness and affection in his voice I hadn’t expected. Not that I didn’t wish Jonah well; I just hadn’t gotten the sense when he’d initially told me that this date was anything more than casual.

“Brooklyn, do you know what’s happened to you?” the doctor asked.

“Medicine,” she said.

“You’re taking medicine?” he asked, obviously surprised. Brooklyn was a vampire, with presumably the same quick-healing propensities as the rest of us. She shouldn’t have needed medicine.

“Taking it,” she confirmed with a weak nod.

The doctor looked at Jonah. “Why does she have medicine?”

Jonah shook his head. “I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know her that well. We were supposed to have a date earlier this week, but she didn’t show up.”

“Brooklyn, what medicine did you take? Brooklyn?” The doctor snapped his fingers again, but Brooklyn’s gaze was unfocused.

An ambulance, lights and sirens on full, screamed to a stop in front of the building, and two EMTs rolled a gurney inside.

“Will they be able to help her?” Jonah asked.

“I’ll go with her,” Gianakous said. “I’ll make sure she gets what she needs.”

“Call me if there’s an update?”

“Of course,” he said, and began reciting her stats to the EMTs as they placed her on the gurney. Within seconds, she was in the ambulance, and it was roaring away.

Jonah looked completely out of sorts, shell-shocked by the quick turn of events.

I put a hand on his back. “Are you okay?”

“I hardly know what to think. I’m just—this just happened so fast.”

“You haven’t known her very long?”

He shook his head. “We met for coffee. That’s all. Then she stood me up for the date.”

And yet she showed up here, looking for Jonah, and at a location to which the Grey House vampires had only just decided to move. That seemed oddly coincidental.

“Jonah, if she was looking for you, how did she know to find you here?”

He looked at me apologetically.

“You told her you were moving,” I said as the realization hit me.

“It’s Valentine’s Day,” he said. “I was thinking about her, so I left her a message. I told her we’d be here.”

The always cool, always careful captain of the Grey House guards sounded remorseful, guilty even.

“It was Valentine’s Day,” he said again, as if that justified and explained every stupid thing people did for love and companionship. To be fair, it probably explained a fair percentage of them.

It was time to be a friend, as well as a partner. “She came to you for help. If she hadn’t known where you were, she might not have made it.”

“It was such a stupid thing to do,” he said. “To reveal where we were going.”

“And it probably saved her life.”

Jonah reached into his pocket and pulled out a set of keys. He held them out to me.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“The keys to her apartment. I can’t leave, but you can. See if you can find anything there.”

I took the keys, and stared at them. Exactly what did “coffee” mean these days? “Where did you get her keys?”

Jonah rolled his eyes. “Her pocket, about three minutes ago. Merit, she’s a good person, and a smart one. She’s got military training. She wouldn’t starve herself. Something happened to her.”

“I’m not sure she’d be thrilled to learn I was breaking into her apartment.”

“As you pointed out, she came here for help. We’re helping. And you aren’t breaking in. You have the keys.”

I wasn’t sure the CPD would find that argument compelling, but I agreed it was important to find out what had happened.

“What about my invitation? I can’t go in without one.”

“That’s etiquette,” Jonah said, growing exasperation in his voice. “I’m pretty sure she’ll forgive the breach.”

Under the circumstances, I guessed he was right. So I nodded and put the keys in my pocket. “Are the RG members still outside?”

He nodded. “They’re in the cars. They’ll stay until I give them the all-clear.”

I popped out the earbud and handed it to him. “Give this to them, so you have someone immediately accessible. I’ll call you if I find anything.”

“Thank you,” he said, his relief obvious.

“No problem. This is what partners are for.”

I just hoped I could find out something that helped him—and Brooklyn.

—

Brooklyn’s brownstone was in Wicker Park, not far from Mallory’s. It was narrow from front to back, and had windows along one side of the front façade. The windows were dark. A set of covered brick stairs on the other side led into the building.

I got out of the car and headed up the sidewalk. The front door was locked tight, so I pulled out the keys Jonah had given me, selecting the one I thought looked most like a building key.

“Sorry for the intrusion, Brooklyn,” I quietly said, then slipped it into the lock and felt the tumblers shift and drop.

The door popped open, revealing a small foyer with a rack of mailboxes that led to a staircase. So the brownstone had been parceled into apartments.

I walked inside and pulled the door shut behind me, feeling a little like the heroine in a caper movie. On the lookout for prying eyes, I quietly climbed the stairs, which squeaked beneath my feet like unintentional intruder alarms.

I heard steps on the landing above me and faked nonchalance as a guy in his twenties passed me on the stairs. He smiled, just a little.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” I said, politely but without interest, hoping that would be the end of it. When the door opened and closed downstairs, I breathed again.

Brooklyn’s door was at the top of the landing, the brass “2” hanging sideways beside the “B.” I unlocked the door and stepped inside, closing it quietly behind me again.

The apartment was nice, but small, with hardwood floors and arched passageways. The furniture was sparse, mostly vintage, but good quality. Nice chests of drawers and buffet tables, a long, low couch with a built-in table at one end. There was an inset area along one wall that probably would have held an old-fashioned telephone back in the day. Today, it held a vase of wilted flowers. Whatever had gone wrong, maybe it hadn’t gone wrong here.

Otherwise, the apartment looked completely normal. Not too tidy, not too messy.

A kitchen was tucked beside the living room. The refrigerator was ancient, but humming steadily. I pulled it open. It was bare, but for two unopened bottles of blood and milk two days past its expiration.

A carton of orange juice sat on the counter. I picked it up and found it empty. An empty glass sat nearby.

I stepped on the trash can’s pedal and peeked inside. It was empty. No evidence of drugs or empty bottles of juice from a “cleanse” that might have explained Brooklyn’s condition.

Floors creaking beneath me, I walked back into the living room, and then into the small hallway off to the side. There was a small bathroom, mostly clean. The medicine cabinet held the usual suspects. Toothpaste, mouthwash, lotion . . . but there were no mysterious “medicines” a vampire wouldn’t have needed, in any event.

Thinking the bedroom was at the other end of the hallway, I tiptoed across the wooden slats, which creaked beneath my feet, and peeked inside. The bed was unmade, the sheets tossed around as if Brooklyn had had a few bad nights of sleep. The room smelled unwashed, as though the odors of many nights of sweaty bodies had collected there.

So she got sick, lay down in the bed, and didn’t get up for days? How could that happen to a vampire?

I wandered back into the living room. How did a woman who seemed otherwise healthy just stop eating and drinking? As a vampire, her bloodlust should have kicked in long before she got to her current state. She’d have been biologically driven to drink, even if she didn’t have the emotional capacity for it. I’d have expected a blood-drinking frenzy—even attacks on her neighbors—instead of the normalcy I’d found.

I looked around the room, searching for anything that might give me a hint about her condition, or the “medicine” she’d ingested.