“They didn’t. She turned herself in three days ago. Said she needed protective custody.”
The Old Ones. They must have been closing in on her.
“But why did the Goons call you?” Unlike humans, paranormals had no right to legal counsel. We weren’t guaranteed a phone call, either. The cops could legally hold Juliet indefinitely, without ever telling anyone she was in custody. There had to be a reason they were calling now.
“Juliet says she’ll cooperate fully if she can talk to a lawyer first. She asked for me.” He turned in his seat and put a hand on my arm. I didn’t like the look in his eyes. “You realize it’s impossible for me to represent her.”
“What do you mean? Of course you have to.”
“Vicky, somebody murdered a Supreme Court justice and tried to pin it on me. Juliet was involved. I can’t imagine a bigger conflict of interest.”
“She didn’t frame you. I know she didn’t.”
“You can’t say that. I know she’s your friend, but you haven’t even heard from her in, what, six weeks or longer.”
I hadn’t told anyone about Juliet’s postcards, not even Kane. It was like she was confiding in me, and they were too secret and too urgent to share.
“So you’re just abandoning her to the mercy of the norms? That doesn’t sound like you.”
“That’s
not
like me.” His glance reproved me for thinking otherwise. “Did you hear me mention Betsy Blythe? That was a referral. Betsy is a terrific defense lawyer. She’s a human who has a decent track record in paranormal cases. In fact, let me give her a call now.”
He placed the call, waited several seconds, and glanced at me. “Voice mail,” he said. At the beep, he said, “Hi, Betsy. It’s Kane. I gave your name to the JHP”—JHP was short for Joint Human-Paranormal Task Force, the Goon Squad’s official designation—“as a referral for a vampire they’re holding. Her name is Juliet Capulet, and she’s wanted for questioning in connection with the murder of Justice Frederickson down in D.C. She says she’ll cooperate after she’s spoken to a lawyer, so they’re allowing her access. She asked for me, but for obvious reasons I can’t take her on as a client. Of course, I immediately thought of you. If you could meet with her, I’d really appreciate it. I’ll touch base with you in the morning, but call any time if you have questions. Thanks, Betsy.”
He put his phone away and took my hand. “All right? Betsy’s top-notch, Vicky. Juliet will have competent counsel. I promise.”
“She asked for you.”
“It’s the best I can do.”
I pulled my hand away. It sat in my lap, clenched into a fist. When I spoke, my voice sounded tight. “You won’t help her, even for my sake?”
“It’s not a matter of ‘won’t.’ It’s ‘can’t.’ I cannot represent Juliet when there’s a cloud over our relationship.” He put a finger under my chin and turned my face toward him. His gray eyes were sincere. “If I did, it wouldn’t be fair to her.”
He was right, damn it. But that didn’t mean I had to like it. I jerked my head away and stared out the side window.
Kane laid a hand on my shoulder. He pressed my arm. I didn’t turn. After a moment, he sighed and started the car. We pulled out of the parking lot and back onto Route 9.
My chest felt tight as I watched the wood-framed houses of Newton go by. Most of them were dark, their norm inhabitants asleep. Maybe they were having flying dreams. Maybe they dreamed they were being chased by monsters like the two who drove silently past in a late-model BMW. Whatever. They were lucky. They weren’t sitting alone in some Goon Squad cell waiting for a lawyer who wasn’t coming. I turned in my seat. “I want to see her, Kane.”
“All right.” He nodded. “I’ll tell Betsy to try to get you on the list of approved visitors.”
“No, I want to see her now. Tonight. I want you to drop me off at the Goon Squad’s holding facility.”
We stopped at a red light. He looked at me as though I’d just told him I wanted to run the Boston Marathon route in my dress and high-heeled boots. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“I’m not asking your permission.”
A muscle twitched in his jaw. “Okay, you’re not asking my permission. And you won’t let me talk you out of it, either.”
“Just drop me off.”
“They won’t let you in.” The light turned green, and we crossed the intersection.
“I’ve got to try. You say you can’t represent Juliet because she’s mixed up with the Old Ones. That’s exactly why I need to talk to her. She might know where Pryce is.”
It was my best argument. Kane knew what Pryce had tried to do to me, and it bothered him that my demi-demon “cousin” was still out there. No one knew where Pryce was or why the Old Ones had taken him—except maybe Juliet.
“All right.” The words were more growl than agreement. And I didn’t really care whether or not he dropped me off—we both knew I’d try to see Juliet tonight, wherever I got out of the car. Yet his willingness meant something, an acknowledgment of my friend’s importance to me. Perhaps even an acknowledgment that I could be right about her.
I needed to make sure Juliet was okay. I needed to find out what she knew about Pryce and the Old Ones. I needed to find out what had happened that night in Washington. There were lots of reasons I needed to talk to Juliet. And they couldn’t wait until my name showed up on some officially approved list.
5
KANE PULLED THE BMW OVER JUST BEFORE THE CHECKPOINT out of human-controlled Boston. “Mind if I let you off here? I want to stop by the office and pick up some papers, and I don’t think they’d let me back through.” He nodded toward the checkpoint, where a bored guard paged through a comic book. Spider-Man. I could see the cover from here. With the code-red restrictions in place, there wasn’t much traffic between Deadtown and the rest of the city. Kane’s office was on the norms’ side of the barrier, near Government Center. But since it was past eleven, well outside norm business hours, the guard might insist he stay put.
“Sure. I’ll go through the walk-up booth.” There was only one open tonight. “We’re practically on the Goon Squad’s doorstep, anyway.” The first building in the New Combat Zone, the block between the checkpoints into Deadtown and the rest of the city, was my goal: a nondescript concrete structure that served as the Goon Squad’s headquarters and detention center.
“Thanks for dropping me off here,” I said.
Kane put a hand on my leg. His fingers toyed with the hem of my dress. “This isn’t how I’d imagined tonight ending.”
“The night’s not over yet.” I leaned over and kissed him. “I’ll see you back at your place.”
He put an arm around me and pulled me to him. As we kissed again, longer, his fingers caressed my neck, bringing up shivers.
“I’ll be waiting,” he whispered.
It was my damn high-heeled boots that made me stagger a little on my way to the walk-up booth.
The guard barely glanced at my ID before he swiped it. The norms don’t care who’s leaving their part of town half as much as they care who’s entering it.
I went into the Goon Squad building. The main activity—headquarters and offices—was upstairs. The holding facility was deep in the soundproofed basement. I clacked down the stairs in my boots and pulled open the glass door at the bottom.
A human woman looked up from the reception desk. She was about forty, had on no makeup, and wore her hair slicked back in a ponytail. “Yeah?”
“I’m here to see Juliet Capulet.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You’re her attorney? I thought you said you couldn’t come in until morning.”
Betsy Blythe had already called back. That was a good sign. Maybe Kane’s faith in her was justified.
I decided to ignore the receptionist’s question—no point in lying to the police unless absolutely necessary—and responded to her statement instead. “If I waited until morning, there’d be no point, would there? Vampires sleep during the day.” Juliet was old for a vampire, with all of the powers age conferred. She could stay up half the day if she wanted, but most vampires conked out as soon as the sun cleared the horizon.
The receptionist considered, then shrugged. “Sign in here,” she said, turning an open book toward me. “I’ll need to search your bag.”
As she opened my purse, I scrawled a signature that could be anything from
Betsy Blythe
to
John Hancock
.
“No weapons allowed in the cells. I’ll give you a receipt for this knife.” She removed a bronze dagger and set it on her desk. “And this one.”
The second dagger made her raise an eyebrow. But both eyebrows went up when the third dagger, the one in my boot, set off the metal detector. I handed it over. “Jesus, how many blades do you carry?” She crossed out the number she’d been writing on my receipt.
“I’m, um, taking a self-defense class.”
Uh-huh,
said her look.
In a cocktail dress and pearls.
“Can’t be too careful in the Zone, right?” I added.
“Well, that’s true. I never go to any of the monster bars. I walk straight between work and the checkpoint. And the place still creeps me out.” She handed me a ticket. “I’ll get a guard to escort you to the prisoner. Use this to reclaim your weapons on the way out.” She handed me a slip of paper, which I stuffed into my purse.
The uniformed guard was also human—six two, buzz cut, with shoulders that might even give him an edge in a wrestling match with a zombie. He jerked his head to indicate I should follow. We went down a hallway and turned a corner. I waited while he removed a ring of keys from his belt and sorted through them to open a metal door. Near the end of another long hallway he stopped and again went through his keys. He opened a door and gestured me inside.
“Fifteen minutes,” he said.
I went in. The door shut and locked behind me.
Juliet sat on a narrow cot, on top of a scratchy-looking beige blanket. She was thin. Not concentration-camp-victim thin, but she’d lost her voluptuousness. Her elbows looked knobby in the short-sleeved orange prison shirt. Her long black hair was stringy and lusterless.
This was not the Juliet I knew. My Juliet had made Romeo fall in love with her at first sight more than six centuries ago. Since then, countless others had fallen for her sultry gaze, the curve of her mouth, her effortless allure. This Juliet looked frail, like the years (if not yet the centuries) were catching up with her.
If she was surprised to see me, she didn’t show it. I wanted to hug her, but she made no move toward me. Just a steady stare.
There was a chair against the wall by the door. I sat in it.
“Hi,” I said. “Orange is so not your color.”
She pressed her lips into a tight, tiny smile—a vampire’s smile. “They told me this style doesn’t come in black.”
We stared at each other. Juliet’s face was as still and unblinking, as if carved from marble.
My questions tumbled out all at once. “So what’s going on?” I asked. “Where have you been? Who are the Old Ones? What the hell happened in Washington?”
She said nothing but shifted on her cot, crossing her legs. A chain rattled. A silver shackle was locked around her right ankle, connected to thick links of silver chain that coiled on the floor and disappeared under the bed. Around the shackle, her skin was mottled purple and black, covered with large blisters. That had to hurt.
Juliet flicked a glance toward a corner of the room, behind me. I turned in my chair to see a mounted video camera winking at us rhythmically with its red eye. The room was probably bugged, too. So much for lawyer-client privilege. Not that any such thing existed for us monsters.
“Are they treating you okay?” I asked.
Juliet sniffed. “I turned myself in to get protective custody. That means they’re supposed to keep moving me to different facilities, not leave me here chained to the wall like some pathetic Andromeda waiting for the sea monster.” She rattled the chain. It looked long enough to let her move around the cell. Not that there was anywhere to go in the eight-by-ten room. “If they don’t torture me to death with silver, they’ll drive me insane with that camera. The way it’s always blinking, blinking, blinking. I can’t ignore it.” As a predator, Juliet’s vampire senses were hyperalert to any movement. She could probably see the pulse of the recording light even through closed eyelids. “Or else they’ll starve me with diluted blood.” She wrinkled her nose. “They serve it cold. In a bottle.”
Blood loses vitality when it leaves the body, and vampires need living blood to thrive. The Goon Squad should know that. But obviously they didn’t care. They were giving Juliet enough nourishment to keep her alive, but weak. She’d be easier to handle that way. “I’ll see if there’s anything Kane can do.”
“Why didn’t he come? I asked for him specifically.”
“He said . . .” I looked around, wondering where they’d hidden the microphone, and didn’t finish.
How the hell were we supposed to have any kind of meaningful conversation? There was so much to talk about, but nothing we could say, given the circumstances. We went back to staring at each other.
Coming here to talk with Juliet had been a bad idea. In the morning, her real lawyer would show up. There might be trouble for Juliet because I’d dropped by tonight. And I hadn’t gotten an answer to even one of my million-and-two questions.
So much for helping my roommate.
At least I could try to play lawyer, then get advice from Kane. What would he be asking if he were here?
“Have any specific charges been brought against you?” I asked, trying to sound like I knew what I was doing.
Instead of answering, Juliet gasped. “What on earth?” She was looking over my shoulder, toward the camera.
I twisted around. It took me a moment to realize what she’d seen. There was no blinking from the video camera. Its light had gone dark.
Out in the hallway, something crashed, making the cell’s cement floor shudder. The crash was followed by a protracted scream, a sound twisted with unfathomable fear and pain.