Secret Worlds (235 page)

“Sloughing? I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lie. “I dumped her after Gaire and I … CeCe Graham is alive and well and on campus somewhere right now. I don’t know where. I do know she planned on attending college in Michigan—didn’t ask which one.”

“Well, shall we try Michigan State? Or a more immediate resolution would be to contact her family.”

Damn it, he just wouldn’t give up.

“I could call her parents, drop by, but after the intervention, assumed possession, discussions of exorcism, and then the quick recovery, they were led to believe it was drugs. They may not be as liberal with information leading to their daughter’s whereabouts from a street walker on the arm of a guy that looks and dresses like her business manager.” Chew on that, dragon breath. I’d snarked him and fed him a few other Down Under possibilities for my true nature. Demons to angels and a shitload in between; the possibilities are endless.

“I see. Well, while demon possession would seem inappropriate for what you are wearing, I could see the attraction. She certainly is worth a demon’s evil endeavors in other ways, now isn’t she?” Vuur chuckles and rolls his eyes in mock camaraderie.

Demons usually possess the pure, the religious. He’s putting down my attempts to hide my identity, and I choose to ignore his smartass attitude. Jane does not.

“Admit it, you’re attracted to me—evil incarnate—and, oh, how you’d love to get all down and dirty with me, huh? Well, bring it on, big guy. Let’s get the sexual tension out of the way,” she says. “It’s twenty for a—”

“Although I’m getting used to your Jeckle and Hyde, yin-yang battle from within, it repels and annoys me.” Vuur takes a moment to emit large furry animal warning noises. “I suggest you reign in your bawdy side. If you can’t keep her at bay, I’d be happy to assist.”

“’Ey, hothead, I’m right ’ere. Talk to me, not at me.” Jane thumbs the soft valley between our breasts. “You can assist, alright. Shut your trap and start actin’ like a nice guy instead of a hubris prick. That’s how you can assist.”

“My dear,” Vuur says, “while you definitely made a debauchery of the English language with that eye-watering attempt at ridicule, I certainly must commend you on the usage of the word hubris.”

“I didn’t debitch nothin’!”

“Exactly. And this, young lady, was, and will be, my only attempt at ’actin’ like a nice guy’.”

“Alright, that is enough,” I say. “How about we both give up our debauched attempts at foreplay—metaphorically—” I smile at his steaming nose holes. “—and try real hard to stay on point. How about we work on a game plan?”

“Fine,” the dragon says. “Will you be calling your last victim’s family, or will I?”

“All the faith I had had, had had nothin’ to do with you doin’ shit for us,” Jane mumbled.

“Although your rapid-fire usage of the word had is quite impressive,” Vuur tells Jane, “the remainder of that sentence hurt my head. Not to worry; I am quite sure no one else in this seedy establishment can see the humor within your misdirected epiphany.”

“Jeeze! Speak freakin’ English, will ya?” Jane says on our way out of the diner, thumbs punching numbers into a cellphone. “But shut up right now. I’m makin’ the call.”

“It’s only the first week in September and it’s fifty-seven degrees!” I say, hands wrapped around my arms as I bounce beside Vuur’s Jeep Wrangler in my Florida weather garb. “How do these people live here when it drops below fifty?”

The wind blows my hair back, and my reflection in in the jeep’s side-mirror has cherry red cheeks.

CeCe’s mother had been compliant when I told her I’d been a roommate the previous year and wanted to hook up again this year. I didn’t even have to mention the college; she didn’t give me a chance. She told me she’d already secured a room for her daughter. With an acid-laced voice, CeCe’s mother then added her daughter had found another location, a rental a mile from Ferris State campus, but she didn’t have an address.

It had been twenty-six hours since we’d arrived, and we’d seen neither her nor Gaire. CeCe was not staying on campus in the dorm, and she wasn’t at the address her mother had given us. Twelve guys were, though, and not one knew my former host.

“In my country, the climate can be very brutal,” Vuur says. “I remember a winter back in fourteen—”

“Who gives a shit! My tits are freezin’ off my chest!” Jane blurts. “Let’s find this bitch and get the hell out of here.”

It was a lot easier to control CeCe. This blonde haired, blue eyed beauty is aggressive, antagonistic, and absolutely addictive.

“Surely you did not have a lucrative business with a mouth like that?” Vuur says under glaring eyes.

“The men I deal with appreciate a mouth like mine,” Jane says, with a wicked smile and our hands stuffed in the back pockets of our jeans.

“Yes, well, with men of that caliber,” Vuur counters, “I’m quite sure it was
not
what came out of your mouth that they appreciated.”

“Will a bullet through your smartass heart shut that F’n mouth of yours?” Jane wants to know.

I love her lewd and assertive personality, and find myself soaking it up. Without a host, I tend to be on the timid side. That has gotten me nowhere. I haven’t tried to argue with Mother without a host in years. Maybe after Jane, I will finally be able to stand up for myself and win my independence.

“Do you see this CeCe human anywhere?” the dragon shifter asks with obvious diversion. “I have seen no one who even remotely resembles Rogaire. Have you?”

“When did you meet Gaire?” I ask, and feel the heat of Jane’s anger run up my chest and into my scalp. I can also feel Smith & Wesson between our lower back and the waistband on our jeans.

“I haven’t met him. Not personally. His father, with the help of a vampire at Purgatory, implanted several images in my mind of human forms Rogaire was said to have purchased through an aboveground organization, ROAR.”

“Yeah, right. Roar? You pullin’ my leg or somethin’?” Jane says. “And what’s with this Rogaire shit? It’s Gaire.”

“Which one of your queries should I address first?” Vuur asks, eyes locked on Jane’s.

I wiggle in and say, “And Down Under allows an organization like that to operate above ground? It’s hard to believe they’re getting away with it.”

“For years,” Vuur says through a scowl. “The ticket is high for any information leading to the breakdown of this operation. They are transient, cautious, evasive, and hard to infiltrate. I know, because I have tried, unsuccessfully, several times.”

As the dragon spoke, I’d scanned the walkways and parking lot outside of a coffee shop located center campus. Students hustle in and out, sweaters and light jackets fluttering in the crisp fall breeze. A sign hanging on a pole by the curb clacks angrily at a gust of wind. I’m freezing.

Jane notices the man before I do, and gasps, alerting Vuur.

“What? Do you see one of them?”

I feel Jane’s skin quiver.

“No,” I say, eyes on the tall man in a dark suit sauntering up to a black sedan parked in the first row of vehicles, across from the coffee shop entrance. We stand two rows back, where the jeep is parked.

When he turns into the sun, and I can see his face clearly, I realize he’s the serial murderer from the Ambassador hotel, in Orlando. The man we know as Dick.

Dick’s hair is trimmed neatly and parted to the side. The wind lifts a small section and tosses it onto his forehead. He palms it back as he stands near the car and watches the doors on the coffee shop.

A dark-haired girl dressed in a pink and gray running suit steps through the door. Her hair is in a ponytail, arms loaded with books, and she’s talking over her shoulder as a short blonde girl follows her out. It’s CeCe.

Leaning against the sedan, the man in the dark suit pulls a cell phone from his jacket and clicks off pictures or video. The girls walk away from the building and down several steps.

“That’s CeCe,” I whisper to Vuur as the girls hurry toward the sidewalk on the other side of the road in front of the parking lot. “She’s the one in the gray sweats.”

There is a flirty burble of laughter in CeCe’s words as they take a left down the sidewalk toward another building. When their backs face us, Dick stuffs the cell back into his pocket. His randy smile follows the girls’ movement for a moment, and then gold cufflinks toss a ray of sunlight off the side of the black sedan as the man in the dark suit, Jane and I know as Dick, reaches for the door handle.

I walk out of Starbucks and down the stairs in time to see CeCe and her friend round the corner of the building, and quicken my step to a jog. I need to get her alone to be sure, but this girl doesn’t smell the same as the CeCe I thought I tore apart in the apartment above my diner. She smells human—one-hundred percent human.

It had taken me a little over an hour to get ahold of her parents from the parking lot at Michigan State yesterday and then get to Ferris State University via one of my local travel tokens—another seven hours to find her in this small college town. Well, I didn’t find her. I ran into her at a store near the university. When I walked toward the registers, there she was trying to find the one with the shortest line.

She checked out, and then I followed her from the parking lot to a small two-story off campus a couple of blocks from the university. Unfortunately, seven other girls live with her. Time alone with CeCe would be a chance encounter there.

Tired from being on her tail for almost forty-eight hours, I need a few hours of sleep. I’d passed a Motel 8 on Perry Street, tucked between and behind an AutoZone and Bob Evans restaurant. It should work perfectly to keep me under the radar, yet close enough to walk to the university.

If I don’t get some answers from CeCe by tonight about what the hell happened above the diner, and who she really is, I’ll have to hit the sewers some time before morning and check out the otherworld situation in town. Down Under creatures can smell each other. It won’t take long for them to know I’m here even if they’re unable to discern what I am. In Florida, wendigo is the last thing they would think, but up here, especially with winter coming on fast, it’s a possibility. Daddy’s ticket on me would be well advertised.

I feel Gaire right down to my toes before I see him. Vuur is still watching the girls as they turn the corner of the building and run across a thin strip of pavement meant for bicycles. My eyes are more focused on the six feet and hundred-and-ninety pounds of head turning yumminess as he walks out of the coffee shop and jogs down to the sidewalk in time to watch CeCe corner the building.

Gaire’s wearing a different body. He has shoulder-length blond hair and a Florida tan. I can see his eyes—gray rimmed in black—as he cuts across toward the parking lot and down a sidewalk on this side of the road across from the coffee shop. His smile is melt-in-your-mouth sweetness, but what makes Jane’s heart beat wildly in my chest is a gust of wind carrying his scent: fear-stoked danger, musky copper, and dark damp woods. I know in an instant it is Gaire. I also know that although the wind is at his back, it won’t be long before he picks up my scent, too. Without an explanation, I jump in Vuur’s jeep, shut the door, and sit hands in lap, staring at the dragon.

“Would you care to explain your eagerness to leave?” Vuur asks as he slides into the driver’s seat.

“Aren’t we going to follow them?” Looking in the direction the girls went, I’m watching as the black sedan passes Gaire and two buildings, and then drives out onto a city street beside the Ferris campus; I wonder if it’s the street CeCe lives on. And I wonder what in the hell Jane’s john, Dick—the murdering-bastard I let live when I doubled up on Jane—is doing all the way up here in Big Rapids, Michigan, fifteen hundred miles from the Ambassador hotel in Orlando.

“Will youse two just let me outta this damn car?” Jane says.

My eyes are locked on the entrance of the last building CeCe entered, but my mind is wandering.

Jane’s trick from Florida is in Michigan. Why?

Dick was definitely at the college taking pictures of CeCe and the dark haired girl.

But why? Maybe he knows the girl with CeCe. Damn, that would be a bigtime coincidence.

There is no other explanation, because stalking my last host is a totally unacceptable one. Better to think CeCe’s friend lives in Orlando, and that’s where she got Dick’s attention. But still … why follow a possible victim all the way up here?

Because I’m here...

“...is purely bait. We are simply here to observe and follow the girl,” Vuur is saying, “with a hope the wendigo will show.”

As I roll the word
bait
over in my mind, Jane carries on our half of the conversation.

“Two freakin’ hours? I say we reel in the damn hook and make sure it’s still baited,” she whines. “Jesus H, I coulda—”

“Completely destroyed the mission had I allowed you to follow them into that building,” The dragon tells Jane.

I feel like a third party, having missed part of their conversation, my eyes still locked on the doors of the building across from us.

“I gotta take a piss,” Jane blurts, hand reaching over the center console where a childproof lock-switch is located in the middle of the dashboard.

I barely notice Vuur grab Jane’s hand.

“Well, it’s about time,” I say and point to our girl bouncing through the door with a thick guy, with short hair, tight jeans, and tighter tee. The guy is smiling down at her like she’s a set of posts at the end of a football field waiting for him to kick the winning field goal.

“Finally, youse guys, I thought she’d died and gone to Hell,” Jane says, eyes locked on CeCe walking down the sidewalk away from the building. “Anybody else notice how skinny she is? Flat chested too. Hey, is she leaving campus?” She looks at Vuur. “Crank this baby up.”

“I was under the impression you have to urinate.” Vuur says with an unnecessary grin.

“Suddenly pissing don’t feel that important,” Jane says. “So turn the key, back’er up, and let’s move it, Warden.”

“Your absence of patience borders on barely tolerable,” Vuur says, watching CeCe cross the road to the parking lot as he turns the key in the ignition. “It is not especially endearing.”