Balance (The Divine, Book One) (25 page)

“So
what’s next?” Obi asked when we reached the ground floor. Punkmo was hunched
down behind the front desk, on the phone with the Police.

“That’s
right, gunshots,” he was saying. “Drug dealers? I don’t know, could be a gang
too, who gives a crap. Are you going to send a car or what?” He didn’t look up
as we walked past.

“We
need to get Rebecca someplace dark so she can rest for awhile, “ I said. “And
you and I need to talk.”

Just
being out of the sun had already returned some of the opacity to the vampiress’
skin, and her hair was darkening by the moment. Even so, she still looked dry
and sick. Dry and sick and stunning. We left the Belmont and headed uptown. I
kept us to the shadows as we walked, only crossing the sun’s direct path when
the limited cloud cover would obscure it.

“Why
attack during the day?” I asked Rebecca.

“It
was a calculated risk,” she replied. “Reyzl was hoping to catch you off-guard,
maybe while you slept. He underestimated you.”

Him and me both.
I had returned from my Source with a new
sense of self, but I hadn’t expected the change to be so dramatic. Even after
pulling down the water tower, I still felt like I had plenty in reserve. It had
taken a fair share of missteps, but I was coming into my own.

“Where
are we going anyway?” Rebecca asked.

“I’m
upgrading our accommodations,” I said.

“Man,
I’ve always wanted to stay here,” Obi said as I pushed open the door to Room
1601 of the Waldorf=Astoria Hotel.

I had
too, which is why I had decided to use the blank card Dante had given me to
create a simulacrum of one of my mother’s credit cards. They had put the card
on file at the front desk, but I had paid for the room with my remaining cash.
After all, it wasn’t stealing if nothing got charged to it, right?

The
suite itself was as magnificent as I had always imagined it would be, the large
living area home to a fancy nineteenth century sofa and loveseat, some
expensive looking ornate wood furniture and a big flat screen television. The
bedroom was just as large, fitting a huge dresser and a king size bed covered
in finery. The marble bathroom rounded out the opulence, and it was easy to
picture myself as someone important like a movie star, or royalty. I laughed at
the irony.

“What’s
funny?” Rebecca asked. We were standing in the bedroom together, having left
Obi watching television on the other side of the door.

“I
was just thinking about being someone important like an actor,” I said. I
looked at her. The daytime stroll hadn’t done her any favors. No amount of
damage could undo her nascent beauty, but she looked ragged and tired. “How are
you feeling?”

She
was tentative in her reply. “I have a small problem,” she said.

I
looked over to the windows. There was a fair amount of light coming in, but I
hadn’t pulled the heavy drapes closed yet.

“Not
dark enough?” I asked.

She
smiled, but it wasn’t a positive smile. She looked anxious and uncomfortable.
“Between the sun and the water, and I haven’t been home in almost three days,”
she looked down at the floor, embarrassed. “I’m hungry.”

I
felt like an idiot. I had forgotten about her dietary needs. Maybe the thought
of her dining should have turned my stomach, but I had seen so much worse in
the last twenty-four hours. Besides, I needed her far more than the world
needed another pimp or gangbanger. I went over to the windows and pulled the
drapes closed, making sure it was nice and dark.

“Just
lay down for awhile,” I told her. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.” I leaned in
to kiss her on the cheek. It was colder than usual. “It shouldn’t take me too
long to find somebody the world won’t miss.”

She
lifted her head. There were tears in her perfect blue eyes. “You’re sweet, but
there isn’t enough time,” she said. “I’ve taken too much of a beating the last
few days. You’re not exactly Gandhi you know.”

“Okay,
how about if I grab the bellhop?” It was intended as a joke, but the blunt truth
was that if it came down to it I would have if she had asked. What she did ask
for was easier to live with, but harder to acquiesce to.

“Landon,
I don’t want to ask you to do this but... you’re a diuscrucis. Whatever I took,
you’d regenerate.” Her eyes pleaded with me.

“You
said my blood could be poison to you,” I reminded her. I wanted to help her,
but the idea of anybody sucking up my life force was giving me the creepy
crawlies.

“I
have to risk it,” she said. “I don’t want you to kill an innocent person
because of me. ”

I
took a few steps back from her. “Just give me a second,” I said.

I had
already been shot, stabbed, torn apart, and fallen from the fifty-something-ith
story of a skyscraper. It was just the concept of it that was frightening me. I
had seen enough vampire movies to be influenced, and I was being stupid. The
only one who could be harmed was Rebecca, and she was as good as gone if I
didn’t agree to it. Seeing her standing
there
, her
skin dry, her hair dull, her eyes wet with tears, there was no way I wouldn’t
do it.

I
rushed forward, wrapped her up in my arms, pulled her head into my neck and
closed my eyes. I felt the warmth of her breath on my skin, and then the soft
touch of her incisors as she bit into me.

I had
expected it to hurt, but it didn’t cause any pain at all. The feeling was more
of
a euphoria
, a strange emotional high. I could feel
her mouth moving against my neck, and I could feel my body reacting as if we
were engaged in more intimate activity. My heart was racing, my eyes blurred,
and a million colors swam and danced in front of me, distracting me from the
act.

All
too soon, it was done. She pulled away from me, holding me up as I came off of
the vampiric high and was left breathless and weak. Rebecca put me down on the
bed, and then lay down on her side facing me. I stared at the ceiling for a few
minutes while my body began to regenerate.

“Thank
you,” she said. She reached over and stroked my hair. “You don’t know how much
it means to me that you did this.”

I
turned my head. She looked healthy, radiant even. Her eyes were a cold blue
fire, her lips redder and fuller, her skin smooth, silky, and shimmering as
though she were covered in glitter. I had never seen anything like it. No human
could ever hope to be as amazingly attractive.

“Chocolate
or garlic?” I asked her.

She
ran her tongue along her lips, tasting whatever leftovers remained there.
“Better than chocolate,” she replied. “I’ve never felt like this before.”

“Me
neither.” I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. My entire body was warm and
tingling. With my eyes closed, I could still see residual ribbons of color like
an aurora borealis in my brain.

“Are
you okay?”

“I’ll
be fine,” I said. “I just need a few minutes to recover. Did you get enough?”

“Right
now I feel like I’ll never need to feed again. If word got out about the
potency of your blood, you’d have every vampire on the planet hunting you down
for a taste.”

“You
mean I don’t already?”

She
laughed. “Good point.”

She
slid closer to me and put her head on my shoulder and her arm over my chest. I
reached around and held her to me. Such a simple closeness, but it felt so
perfect. We sat together for a while, just enjoying the moment of quiet. When I
heard Rebecca’s breathing deepen, I carefully extracted myself and snuck out of
the bedroom.

Obi
was stretched out on the sofa, still watching television. When I slipped into
the room, he sat up and turned it off.

“I
was worried you weren’t going to make it out of there,” he said with a laugh.

I
reached up and ran my hand over my neck. The bite marks had already healed
over. “We’re just friends,” I told him.

Weren’t
we? I hadn’t had time to give it much thought. She was beautiful, and I was
attracted to her, but it was a lot more complicated than that, her impending
death match with her father not withstanding.

“It’s
none of my business anyway,” he said, sitting up and turning of the TV. “The
Exchange is a mess because of you,” he continued. “After your little event at
the soiree, most of the biggest dealers have gone to ground. They know we’ve
been eavesdropping, and they’re afraid of becoming your next target.”

“They
thought I was there to take down Merov?” I asked. That was better than I could
have hoped for. We didn’t need word getting back to the Demon Queen that I was
after the Chalice.

“Yup,
but there’s more.” His smile was huge. “They think the only reason anybody got
out alive was because Reyzl showed up. They’re scared bloodless of you. Hell,
after what I saw today, so am I.”

I hadn’t
thought about the positive effect I could have had if I had gone after the
vampires. Dante had given me a goal, but maybe there were other opportunities
that I wasn’t considering.

“So
the Exchange isn’t producing much info anymore,” I said. “Tell me you found
another source.”

“Who
knew that demons were so into computers?” he said. “There’s another site, it’s
a Freenet image board. They upload pics with the messages encrypted in the byte
code. Nasty stuff. Nothing you’d ever want to have to look at.” His smile faded
and he looked distracted. “But yeah, anyway I had some samples on the iPad, but
they took it. I didn’t get a chance to crack the encryption.”

“It’s
okay if you don’t want to go any deeper into that stuff,” I said. I was already
sorry for whatever it was he had seen.

“Don’t
sweat it man. I want to crack that code so we can find those assholes and I can
watch you rip their twisted heads off.”

“I
have another task for you, if you’re up to it. It’s something a little more
clandestine. Merov’s apartment.”

“What
about it?” he asked.

“We
need to get back in, and we need to break into his office. It’s got some kind
of fingerprint security system, but it’s not his fingerprint. He keeps a sliver
of the prior owner’s finger in a case so he can get by. I think our lead on the
Chalice is somewhere in that room. “

“Man,
you had to swan dive fifty stories to get out of there, and now you want to go
back
in
?” He shook his head. “Wait a second. You said we.”

“I
need you to come with. If Merov has a computer, and I’m sure he does, you’re
going to need to be there to hack it.”

Obi
tapped his fingers on the coffee table while he thought about it. “So, you need
me to try to figure out what kind of security he’s using, come up with a way to
circumvent it, and then hack his computer. Is that about right?”

“A
blueprint of the building might come in handy too,” I said. “I can’t take you
out the window.”

“I’m
starting to rethink my pledge of service,” he said.

“Sorry
Obi, you can’t unbend the knee.”

Obi
stood up and headed for the door, grabbing his gun on the way by and tucking it
into the back of his jeans. “I’ll be at the library, doing some research,” he
said. He motioned towards the bedroom door with his head. “Try not to have too
much fun while I’m gone.”

He
laughed when my face reddened, and left before I could stammer on about how it
wasn’t like that, we were just friends, and we had business to take care of.
Just thinking about the vampire girl sleeping in the bed on the other side of
the door drove me to distraction. I had something else I wanted to take care
of, so I scribbled out a quick note to Rebecca and slid it under the door.

The
sun was sinking towards the horizon when I pushed through the revolving doors
of the Waldorf and stepped out into the street. The city around me was bustling
with life, the organized chaos of humanity a comforting sight to my changing
eyes. Before, I had seen myself as one of them who had been picked up and
carried into something much bigger than I could have ever imagined. After my
experience in my Source, I didn’t feel as human anymore. I had grown, evolved
into something... better?

I
hoped so, but it wasn’t without its price. Watching people scurrying through
the streets on their way here or there without a thought in their mind about
what was happening out of their sight, they seemed so small and insignificant.
My compassion was the one thing I least wanted to lose, because I knew there
was nothing balanced in a total lack of feeling, and so I drank in the sight,
took a moment to appreciate it, and continued on.

Dusk
was creeping in by the time I finished the mile and a half walk down to the
Garment District and came to a stop in front of the Holy Trinity Soup Kitchen,
a small storefront at the bottom of an office building that looked more like a
former deli than a food bank. I don’t know what had driven me there at this
time of day, and I should have known that Josette wouldn’t be there, the place
had closed three hours ago. Even so, I could feel her presence in the air
around me, much like I had at the Belmont the day after her visit, and I found
a certain peace and comfort in it. She was spending her mornings doing good in
one of the simplest ways possible, and while I wouldn’t have thought much of it
while I had been alive, I was coming to appreciate such simplicity now.